Nick and Jen Lloyd

So a lot of you have had questions about our address and how it works. Basically an APO is a military overseas PO box. So all of your mail gets sent to New York, where it is processed by the military postal service and sent on a military bird overseas. Sooo…when you pay for “overnight shipping” that just means it will get to New York overnight, the military will take as long as they like getting it over the ocean and to our post office. So far we’ve found that things come in about a week. We have heard sometimes it takes two weeks, but everything we have gotten has taken 7-9 days.

If you are sending anything heavy, I recommend using flat rate boxes. If it is light, use your own box or envelope. From what I understand you get U.S. shipping rates up to a certain size, then you have to pay extra (it’s pretty big though, so no worries). Don’t pay extra to have it go faster. But if it is valuable, do pay for insurance because it does cover it even when handled by the military postal service.

Some online companies do ship to APO’s you just have to check their policies. Amazon ships MOST things to APO’s. There are a few larger or more expensive things that they won’t. Their “2 day shipping” does not come in two days, but it is nice to get the free shipping from them. So if you need to send us something that can be bought on Amazon, take advantage of the free shipping on over $25.

You will have to fill out a customs forms when sending anything besides a letter to us. For envelopes and small packages you need the smaller customs form and for boxes you need the bigger one. You will have to make an itemized list of what is in the package, how many of each item, and how much it’s worth. They will tell you it has to be exact, but if you don’t know, just write something.

Ummm…I think that’s it. If you have other questions let me know.
And when I said you could only address things to Nick I was wrong so our address is:
Lloyd
CMR 427 Box 3949
APO, AE 09630

(APO is the city, AE is the state)

Here are some photos of Jonah’s first whole head hair cut. He was thoroughly upset about the loss of his hair, but I think he looks much better now.

Happy birthday to my official toddler!!! Thank you so much to our friends Heather, Colby, Ethan and Ryan for hosting a birthday party for Jonah yesterday. Ethan and Jonah both love trains so it was a fun party!

If you ever want to spend a day completely lost, Venice is the place to be. We spent pretty much all day Saturday wandering the streets, taking in the beautiful sights and not knowing at any point where the heck we were. The streets were narrow and every once in awhile they’d open up to some big square and we could figure out where we were. We did make it all the way to the opposite side of town where San Marco square is (the big fancy Byzantine church), and then considered taking a water taxi back up the Grand Canal but decided that since we walked there we could walk back. Definitely wish we would have just taken the taxi. We made several circles before finding our way, completely exhausted, back to the train station. Train tickets are still a little bit confusing for us, but we’re figuring things out. (there was a 60% chance of rain that day so we didn’t bring the “nice” camera, that’s why the pictures aren’t as amazing this time…even though there never was a single drop of rain!)

Jonah doesn’t often put more than one word together on his own so when he does we celebrate. He just said:

“Nice Daddy”

I assume he was telling daddy to be nice. I guess I say “be nice” to Jonah a few times a day…

This weekend the boys were feeling a bit under the weather so we stayed “home” and participated in the Easter Eggstravagnaza on base. Jonah seemed confused about all of it but enjoyed the chocolate and opening and closing the plastic eggs. He did NOT enjoy the easter bunny, and didn’t quite grasp the egg hunt, but overall we had fun.

We are trying to decide if we want to fight for privatized housing or give in to the government housing. We have seen two options that seem alright. The choice is this…

3 bdrm apartment with really small bedrooms that is only a few miles from base.
OR
3bdrm apartment with big bedrooms that is 8 miles from base.

What do you think?

Nick here posting…
This weekend’s Lloyd family trip was to the city of Verona. Most people have only heard of Verona because it is the setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliette. What a lot of people don’t know is how incredibly beautiful the city is.

We took a train from Vicenza to Verona. There are two kinds of trains here, Eurostar and Regionale. Eurostar trains are direct, fast and expensive. Two one way tickets to Verona would have cost us about $40. On the other hand, Regionale trains are slow, stop at every small station along the way and are very inexpensive. Two one way Regionale tickets cost us only $12. The Eurostar train would have taken a little over a half hour. The Regionale got us there in about an hour and fifteen minutes. It wasn’t that bad though, and frankly we just couldn’t imagine spending $80 for a day trips transportation to a city that’s not even very far away.

Verona, as viewed immediately outside the train station, isn’t much to look at. After a fifteen minute walk into the city centre though, the scene changes dramatically. Beautiful, centuries old houses and buildings line the streets; painted pastel yellows, and reds. As you enter the heart of the city you pass through an archway into Piazza Del Erbe, where street vendors sold everything from lemon trees to pottery. In the Piazza is the Arena di Verona which resembles the coliseum in Rome but is a bit smaller. Later in the day we stopped at a pasticceria vendor, who sold us a cannoli worth dying for.

Next we saw the famous “Juliette’s Balcony.” The entryway into it had the names of thousands of couples graffitied on the walls.

We stopped next to a fountain:

We saw several cool churches:

Then we crossed the river by bridge, yielding the most spectacular view I’ve ever seen. It was incredible.

And here’s a picture of a cool museum:

And lastly here’s a photo from the streets of Verona:

Overall Verona was the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. I may make this claim again down the road since I haven’t seen all of Italy or Europe yet, but for now Verona is the city to beat. There were a LOT of tourists about, which was a bit of a downer, and the stores were upscale boutiques that obviously catered to rich foreigners, but the beauty of just walking down the streets of the city totally made up for those small shortcomings.

Went to the housing office today and found out that Vicenza is under mandatory housing assignment. Which means that if they have government housing available, you pretty much have to take it. The only way around it is to turn down government housing, at which point they stop giving you housing money and you pay your own rent until their is nothing available at which time your housing allowance will resume.

They don’t have anything in the “Villagio” (the on post housing) but they do have some government leased apartments available. So we go on Monday to have a look at those. We saw a few pictures and frankly I’m not too impressed….we’ll see.

Some of you have asked how you can get ahold of us. Here is our contact plan…
You can call us on Skype (does not have to be video, just use it to call). We try to stay logged on so that we are available. Just look me up “jenwlloyd”. Or I can call you for free using Google call. So if you need to get in touch and we are not signed on to skype, just email me or Nick with a phone number and we will call you back!

Still in the hotel. We start looking at housing tomorrow. That’s all I know.