A Staged Retreat

Oscar welcoming us to Somerset

After a very roundabout route, the boys and I are now in England. In Somerset, to be specific, hanging out at my parents' lovely house in the country, nestled into a hillside (a bit like a hobbit hole) with a few other barn conversions in the middle of a farm. There are always lots of opportunities here for long country walks with their Border Collie, Oscar, as long as you don't mind dodging cows and fences. It's a great place to find our bearings, and get over our jet lag, which was significantly worse than usual.

The Pier at Kitty Hawk, NC

I attribute the worse-than-usual jet lag to the crazy few weeks getting ready to leave, and then our tour of the East Coast of the USA. We actually left Columbus on the 18th, and headed to Baltimore for a lacrosse tournament. Then we drove down through Virginia to the Outer Banks in North Carolina for a brief family vacation, before flying out of Charlotte. It was tough saying good bye to the dear husband in Charlotte, even though it makes sense to divide the family, so that we can work on the move from different sides of the Atlantic. He drove our car back to Columbus, and has been working furiously to get movers organized, patch up the house ready to get it on the market, and get the pets booked on a flight as the next contingent of Allens to cross the Pond. As I keep telling everyone, this move is a staged retreat.

 My goals for this week, apart from adjusting to the time and culture shift, were twofold - organize some sort of transportation, and get mobile communications up and running. My Mum and Dad were gracious and generous enough to get the former organized before we arrived - my Dad met us at Heathrow with our new car, a sleek, silver Peugeot with lots of space for lacrosse (and other) equipment. He had picked it up at a car auction a week or so ago, and he and Mum had worked hard to get it repaired, cleaned up and equipped for our use in time for our arrival. So far so good... we are lucky to have such great family help.

Setting up mobile communications, however, has been a disaster, and has still not been achieved, thanks to the stubbornness and vagaries of our US cell phone carrier. Apparently, they don't want to let us go, which would be sweet, except that it is costing us a fortune and we still can't use our phones over here until they unlock them for us. My poor husband has spent hours on the phone with them negotiating, explaining and arguing with various levels of bureaucracy in the company to get them to release our phones for our use now that we live in a different country. In the meantime, I have been spending time and money getting new SIM cards and trying to get them to work with new service contracts, only to be repeatably be told that "the computer says, 'No!'" because our phones are still locked. The great thing about this type of message, is that it locks the phones completely, and prevents us from even using them on wifi.

This is all very frustrating on several different levels - first and foremost because we are now paying two different companies for mobile phone services on two different continents, and yet we have no usable phones at all. But it is also quite disturbing (not to mention inconvenient) to try to function without cell phones in this day and age. I am ashamed to admit that I get quite anxious about not being able to stay in touch with the world while I am out and about, and away from any wifi. Not surprisingly, there are not very many wifi hotspots in the middle of cow fields, or at the beach. I can make all sorts of excuses for this anxiety, such as the need to be able to stay in touch with various members of the family as we make all these arrangements, concern about being separated from the boys without any way to contact them, and the inconvenience of not having a contact number for application forms for driver's licences, British passports and pet transportation arrangements. All British bureaucracy seems to assume that you have a mobile phone number these days as a primary means of contact, which is challenging. However, really, as much as anything, this anxiety is born out of the habit of connectivity. It's almost as if my brain has been rewired, and I find it difficult to function without the internet in my pocket. I have even had to resort to reading maps to find my way around the countryside again - something I used to do regularly with competency and enjoyment, but which now makes me anxious. In the middle of all of this, therefore, there is a lesson in learning to be flexible again in all of this. But can I please get over my jet lag before I am forced to flex my brain?