Today is our first completely rainy day here. Being in a strange city, by myself with 3 kids, it's really scary for me to venture out. Walking to the park, I can handle. Even driving to the grocery store I've managed, so long as I have the GPS. But I have yet to drive into downtown Derby, even with Sean. I forgot to mention that when we picked up the rental car last week they had given our reserved automatic car to someone else so ours is a manual transmission. Yay! Fortunately, I drove a standard vehicle about 9 years ago for a few years when Avery was born. So I'm not totally new to it...but I'm now driving on the left side of the road, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car with the shifter on my left...in a city with absolutely ridiculous road signs. So far it seems like you hardly ever find a road that is marked with its name...only a sign that tells you which towns are in the direction that the road goes...FUN!
So you see, it would be easy for me to just stay home today. Cuddle up in the apartment, watch a movie, read some books, let the kids play and eventually go stir crazy. But then I discovered that this is the last day that the SMURFS movie is playing in the cinema at the mall downtown. I've been promising the kids that I'd take them to see the movie before school starts. I was excited to see that the cinema was showing the movie at 10am this morning, so we scrambled to get out of the house by 9:15. Armed with my GPS, we ventured into downtown Derby which is only a couple miles away. Unfortunately the GPS doesn't tell you how to get into the parking garage (they call it a Car Park here), so I actually had to use my brain to find it. We eventually did, and then found our way into the mall...making a special effort to not forget where we were parked.
We found the mall and made it to our seats in the cinema with 5 minutes to spare. The theater was really nice and we really enjoyed the movie. We got out a little later than I expected because there was about 25 minutes of TV commercials and previews before the movie even started. So we needed to get home for lunch, and Alexa was on the verge of a tantrum because she wanted to eat in the mall. Thankfully, I was able to keep her calm enough to pay for the parking (which has to be done in the mall), and make it back to the car. We did a few loops around Derby city due to me taking wrong turns, but eventually we did make it back home to the apartment. Ahhhh....now I can relax.
The whole trip was a bit stressful for me, but I knew I needed to do it. I'm never going to be comfortable here unless I force myself to be uncomfortable for a while.
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