We Will Miss Pt. 1

As our time here winds down, I thought it would be appropriate to look at the things we will and won’t miss about our lives over the past four years. This, of course, includes both life in Germany as well as being in the Army. We focused mainly on Germany, because the Army does not define us.

When I first set out to write this, I meant for it to be a two-part post. However, after jumping in, I realized that this was quickly turning into more than just two quick blog posts. So, please, enjoy part 1!

We will miss our slow pace of life. We live and work in the same community, so we do not travel far and we see the same people every day. It lends itself to a nice slow pace. We are also as isolated as we want to be from the 24 hour news cycle. We don’t have local news (unless we seek it out online), and our newspapers revolve around the Department of Defense and other military news. As a result, I feel less anxious and cynical about the state of the world, and I like it that way. This is not to say that we are uneducated when it comes to current events, because we certainly still hear about them, but our lives aren’t overly saturated with days of reporting on Charlie Sheen, violent murders or the endless drama of Washington D.C.

We will miss orderly highway driving. While I still prefer not to be the driver on the Autobahn, I will say riding on it is rather nice. Everyone sticks to the pass on the left law (yes, it’s a law in the States too, but people rarely adhere to it), which leads to a much less stressful drive. You do not have to worry about cars zipping past you and the left and right and being surrounded by 18-wheelers. Here, they are only allowed in the right hand lane unless they are passing. They also have a maximum speed limit, which is usually 80 kph or roughly 50 mph.

(I must note that I just lost the rest of this post. I had written five more paragraphs. I am no longer a happy camper.)

We will miss our friends.  During the first three years of John’s assignment here, we struggled to find likeminded friends. However, when John got send to work at the band, we were introduced to a great group of people. We have spent Thanksgiving together, welcomed new babies and celebrated pregnancies as well as many birthdays. Truly, this will be the hardest part about leaving.

We will miss the ease of traveling to our favorite places like the French countryside, Paris, Switzerland, Garmisch and Baden-Baden (in the Black Forest). We will have new places to visit on long weekends like San Antonio, the Texas coast, Dallas and Houston, but none of those have the same relaxing feel or exciting ring of our European getaways. I will admit, however, that if we were German, chances are we wouldn’t think the travel opportunities here were so great. We just wish we could have travelled more, but thanks to the poor exchange rate and our work schedules, we were a bit constrained by what we could do. We are really happy with the vacations that we did go on, though. Every one of them was special and wonderful in its own way.