The fourth of July holiday shut down the base offices for a few days, but being an American holiday, we were still able to fill our days with visits to potential homes and test drives of cars. The rental car supplied by our temporary housing gave us the freedom to explore and explore we did! Schneckenhausen, Otterberg, Otterbach, Sembach, Mehlingen, Katzweiler, Ramstein, Miesenbach, Landstuhl, Heiligenmoschel, Kusel, Rehweiler, Neunkirchen am Potzberg and all the little villages in between. We ate flammkuchen (cracker-thin pizzas, smeared with sour cream, and speckled with garlic, onions, and bacon), bratwurst, currywurst, and pommes frites. We soothed our sweet tooth with eis kugeln (ice cream cones). We stumbled upon playgrounds with adult beverages and visited naturebaths with diving platforms and slides.
We purchased a silver Nissan Qashqai as a little get around car. We were surprised to find out that there is much more bureaucracy in the car-buying process here. You can’t just walk onto a car lot, write a check, depress the clutch and drive away. Instead, you have to fill out paperwork, wait until the base driver’s office opens after the holiday, join a virtual queue at 6:45, race your peers to fill in all your information to get a spot in line, drive to said office, pay for temporary tags, go back to the lot to fill out more paperwork, take the car to the German customs office with the car dealer, then visit the base driver’s license office again for an inspection, and finally receive an inspection sticker and the final plates for your car. These plates are tied to the town that you live in, but all American service members are given Kaiserslautern plates, no matter the town in which they abide, which seems to slightly identify our cars as being American. Due to the holiday, it took six days from the initiation of buying the automobile to having keys in our hot little hands.
While we traversed the paper-pushing of receiving our car, we began searching for our home. We visited a farmhouse in Schneckenhausen with lots of space, beautiful old pine floors, and a barn with a stage area that made my inner theatre-kid heart beat fast. Our next home was a bright, cheerful, marble-filled home in Rehweiler. Then we chased down a house in Otterbach by the great little school that had accepted the children. Next, we visited a stunning nature-lovers’ paradise in Heiligenmoschel with cherry, pear, and apple trees in the lush backyard. It was everything we wanted…and it was already spoken for. Lastly, we visited a home in Föckelberg with four decks, a little outdoor secret garden, and a lovely view over the rolling hills of farmland. The neighbors had goats, horses, and harvested their own honey. The home was full of natural light and had plenty of space for our family and guests. We were sold!
Bureaucracy reared its ugly head again when we found that we couldn’t move in until the government could deliver a washing machine, refrigerator, and temporary furniture and they were four weeks behind! We had to wait another month to move into our new German paradise.
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