Monday, September 9, 2013

Yikes, where to park the lorries?!?

Quick update: We were able to secure car insurance, thank goodness, and we will be picking up our car on Friday of this week. I can't believe how difficult it was to get all of that situated, but its done and I know we are going to be really happy to get our little automatic car :)

Quick update number two, we are still waiting on our wire transfer. It seems everything finally passed all of the security checks in the US and Chase, but it has not been submitted here in our Scottish bank yet.

Quick update number three, the internet and phone should be installed sometime on Wednesday and/or Thursday which means Andrew and I will be connected again to the modern world :)

New lesson today:

Andrew and I had some items shipped from our home in the States. The items left on the 11th day of July and arrived in a UK port in the beginning of September. The items traveled the ocean blue, just backwards according to Christopher Columbus and well actually made port where they needed to (or were expected to), not a few hundred miles short of the "new world" target... but hey, who needs a history lesson...

This is all about new lessons...

Anyway, it never occurred to me that there may be roads that a truck simply could not get down, well lets just say it never occurred to me that a truck could not get down a normal driving street. I could understand perhaps an alley way or something like that. However, since Scotland is incredibly ancient, most of the roadways were designed by the Romans, yeah those Romans, and needed to only be large enough to fit a horse and cart. Unfortunately, nothing much has changed in regards to road sizes.

We received an email from our international shipping company and they sent a picture of the lorries "trucks" they were planning on driving to our place for our shipment and I about fell over. There is no way that truck with a second trailer was even going to make it to our little town let alone down our very little road of Smiddy Burn. Plus just yesterday I noticed that they put up a new sign indicating that our road was "not suitable for large vehicles." Great now what????

So first I emailed the shipping company to inquire why two trailers were needed to haul our stuff which only took up half the trailer capacity when we shipped it out from our home in the States. So thankfully the emailed back and said they would drop the second trailer in preparation to come to our home. Yeah, thats what I thought shipper people we did not ship that much stuff.

However, we are still trying to figure out where now to put a normal sized long haul truck. Andrew and I asked everyone and everyone had no idea. They pretty much have never thought of where you may or may not need to put a large truck carrying a lot of items.

I have sent another email to the international shippers and have not received a response. But it looks like there is a small drive that the truck could pull down, it will have to back out, but it can unload and carry our stuff through the back door of our property.

Tomorrow, when our shipment arrives is going to be a chaotic day I am sure! Wish me luck and send lots of prayers as Andrew is going to be at orientation all day.

Being an ancient country leads to ancient issues that our young country and planned large road ways did not have to deal with or even think about. I wish I could be a fly on the wall as a large truck tries to make it down these very winding, very small, and very beautiful Scottish roads.

New lesson where to park the lorries... I still have no idea :)

Once these small hiccups are done I can't wait to start taking pictures and describing how amazing our little and perfect Scottish town of Kingsbarns is and how wonderful and inspiring St. Andrews is as well. I will also talk about the new places Andrew and discover.

Oh funny story, our new SatNav (GPS) named Serena TomTom has had some difficulties in navigating lately. We asked Serena TomTom to take us to a vodafone (mobile phone company) store about 18 miles away in Dundee, but instead Serena TomTom took us to Perth which is about 40 miles or more away. Andrew and I just kept driving and we knew that Serena TomTom totally messed up, but it was a pleasant surprise and another great adventure. Plus we had no idea where we were anyways and we had to follow Serena TomTom no matter where she decided to take us! LOL! All we could say is oh Serena TomTom :)

A perfectly tarnished child of God

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