It's official.....only 12 days left!!!!!!!!

Our visas have arrived:

Plane tickets have been purchased (we depart at 8:50pm on December 27). We agreed on an apartment - same apartment as in the first post - and are working on getting the lease signed. We have a car lined up (it's a "Vauxhall Insignia or similar" - somehow I don't think we're getting the one in the picture). Companies that lease cars in the UK will only lease for a minimum of 2 years. We toyed with buying a used car, but I don't really want to deal with the hassle of selling it when we are ready to leave. So we are renting a car for the year.

We are not sure how we are going to get our stuff over there, but it looks like we will be checking a lot of bags as opposed to shipping boxes. We just need to figure out how much can fit in our transport to the Philly airport and how much we will be able to fit in our Vauxhall Insignia once we are there! We are only bringing our clothes and some toiletries, but we have A LOT of clothes :-)

We went into Philly to get fingerprinted and have our photographs taken for our visas on December 6. These, along with our passports and a bunch of other documents, were sent to the British Consulate and we received them back with our visas on December 13. A very quick process!

For those of you wondering how we will be speaking, here is a link to help. I expect all of our friends will understand us when we come home because they will have thoroughly studied this link:  http://www.effingpot.com/slang.shtml

Some are quite funny (please refer to "fanny") and those of you that watched Graeme McDowell on hole 16 in Tiger's tournament will be familiar with the term "wanker" and the associated hand gesture (Graemey unnecessarily apologized). We will likely also stop using "z" and replace it with "s," will add "u" to words unnecessarily like "colour," and we will call the letter "z" "zed" from now on. I now work for A-Zed. Please feel free to leave your favorites in the comments.

James already has some trips planned - I believe London the first week in January for a couple days as well as trips to Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland the first few weeks in January. He got his list of key countries that he'll have to travel to - in addition to the aforementioned (and the rest of England), he will be traveling to places like South Africa, UAE, Turkey, France, Spain, and many others. When he read the list to me I replied "I would like to go to all of those countries as well." We'll see how many I actually make it to.

We remain extremely excited and although both of us seem to be drowning with work, we are looking forward to spending time with our families and our friends over the next few weeks.