Since we have just moved to California, we have decided to start a blog so all of our friends and family can easily keep up with us.
I guess we can start with the getting here process, which was, of course, ridiculously long and drawn out and went wrong at every step possible. It all started at 6:30 AM when we woke up early because we still had not packed for our move to CA. Our flight was supposed to leave at 9:40 AM, but when we got to the airport to check in, we discovered that our connecting flight from Dallas to San Jose was cancelled. Finding this out and sorting out the problem took about 45 minutes because there was only one competent person working behind the counter and about 20 other people were having the same problem we were. I won't even go into the ridiculous amount of time spent on the concerned mothers that were sending their daughters off on their first "unsupervised flight" to girl scout camp that were ahead of us in line. We finally got our flight rescheduled to 2:40 that afternoon so we got to hang out in Jackson for a few more hours.
When we got back to the airport we started checking our bags which they were so graciously supposed to comp for us. However, my bag was 5 lbs overweight so that was going to be a $50 overweight bag fee!! Completely ridiculous. So we started throwing things out of my bag and got it down to 50.5 lbs, which they decided they would let slide.
Things went pretty smoothly until we arrived in San Jose, CA, and tried to go get our rental car. Microsoft was in charge of booking all of our travel plans and everything and we just had confirmation numbers that they had sent us. When we got to the rental car place, they could not find our name on the list. Of course, they're computers were down so they couldn't look up the confirmation number that we had been given. We spent around 45 minutes trying to figure out this problem, and finally we just got a car and we're just going to hope that everything sorts itself out once the computers are finally back up.
We finally arrived at the apartment complex where our corporate housing is located. We had an email that gave us very specific instructions on where to go to find the lock box that contained the key to the apartment, so we got that no problem. However, there were no instructions whatsoever to the actual apartment. There were 4 main buildings all in a square formation and each unit was marked with a four digit number. We were given a three digit number in the email and no building number. We wandered around for about 30 minutes searching for anything that was remotely similar to our number. Brief recap, we had woken up at 6:30 AM, and it was now about 12:30 AM central time. We were both extremely frusterated and about to give up, and then we found it! The random 5th building off to the side of the other buildings that didn't match the other buildings and was for some reason marked with three digit numbers instead of four digit numbers like the other buildings. Woohoo!
So long story, but we finally found our "home" for the time being. We pretty much dropped our stuff and crashed immediately. The apartment is pretty nice. Its a fully furnished one bedroom apartment and is SO SO SO much better than a hotel would be!
Today we woke up late and then wandered around Mountain View until lunch. We ate at a really yummy bakery and sat outside and watched a random parade that was going on. Our apartment is located right in the middle of downtown. I love downtown Mountain View! It is a cute cobblestone street type look with all kinds of stores and restaurants all along a one mile strip. After lunch we got on the internet and started looking up different rental properties in the area. We wrote down some addresses and went to try to take a look at several of the promising prospects. We actually found one that we are very hopeful about. It is in a new area that kind of has a seaside type look to it. They are all brand new and really nice! We meet with our real estate agent on Tuesday to start looking at some of the stuff she has found, so we are excited to tell her about what we have found and to see what she has to show us!
Sorry this post has been so long! There was lots of news to catch up on! I guess it is appropriate for the first blog post to be really long and probably full of tons of unnecessary information...that's just how I write and tell stories! We miss everyone already!
yay! where are my pictures?
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