Today marks our 18th day in the UK and our 9th workday. It is starting to feel more like home as we’ve been slowly settling in. The last of our more important items on order arrived this week; including a washer and dryer and we are now better connected to the World Wide Web with our fiber internet installed (the 3G phone service at our home just doesn’t cut it).

The internet is such a blessing that makes the world seem small. It has been great getting to connect with family via FaceTime calls to give them a tour of our place and update on how things are going here. The time difference has made that communication a bit tougher, but we’re doing our best to not call or text when people are asleep.

Our sleeping arrangements have been upgraded to a real mattress since Amber’s last post. She has done a nice job decorating the house to make it feel more homey. It also helped to receive our air shipment this past weekend and to start finding the right place for all of our things. Having more towels and our kitchen supplies back with us have made life easier! The first few days Amber and I shared a single coffee mug as our drinking vessel.

Our couch also arrived last weekend and it is much better than sitting at the dining table or on our bed. We haven’t yet bought a TV which makes the evenings feel like we have more spare time. We’ve cooked some nice meals and gone out a few times. We also had fun baking homemade bread for the first time since the early Covid days. I’m excited to see what other new hobbies or interests that we’ll find ourselves involved in here.

Besides ordering furniture and organizing the house we went out to explore what we have nearby. We’ve made a few visits to Delamere Forest to hike their cool trails with Brindle (4.5 miles this past Sunday). Beeston Castle is another nearby destination we explored that has history dating back to the early 1200s (check out some more info at English Heritage). Amber also found My Dog Field; a 3 acre field that we could rent out an hour time slot to let Brindle run free. This week we found a network of trails that we can walk to right from our house so I’m sure we’ll have more future pics from hikes along it. These beautiful outdoor breaks have been a nice stress reliever in between getting things accomplished at home and work.

Our drive to work is a fairly easy 18 miles with only a couple of turns. Even though it has been an adjustment from our old 7 minute commute I’ve loved spending morning and afternoon drives with my better half as we have more time to discuss our day and listen to music together. Last week it snowed a few days in a row (coworker said it’s been about 3 yrs since they’ve had this much snow). With the locals not being used to driving on snow our commute time doubled those few days; stuck behind cars going 20 mph where the speed limit was 60 mph. Once the snow cleared up we thought our commute would be easier, but similar to potholes in the Great State of Michigan the roads have a few obstacles. Our luck with rental cars hasn’t been great so far. The first car got a nail in the tire; I believe on my drive back from the rental company when I first picked it up. It was a slow leak that we eventually realized wasn’t due to the cold weather and we ended up swapping cars since there were conflicts with when they could repair it. Back to the potholes.. we had our second bumpy ride on the drive to work last week, this time resulted in a fully flat tire and we have now swapped back to the same rental car from the first week.

Work itself has been an adjustment as well. It has been great meeting many friendly people and we’ve both been exposed to new products on our respective teams. It is a much smaller office than we’d been accustomed to, but the cool thing is we have valve manufacturing here on site so we get to be closer to the product as it goes through the full process. Lots of learning to be had in this new environment and we are taking it day by day as we get in the swing of things. Two of the bigger transitions have been from morning coffee to tea and when discussing football it is no longer about the Detroit Lions (or the green team they kept out of the playoffs).

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this update and we’re looking forward to sharing more as we are starting to look ahead at some weekend travels. If you’d like to be notified of our future posts feel free to add your email in the box below or check the box when leaving a comment.

-Jacob