Saturday, March 13, 2010

Getting Settle At Shaw Air Force Base

We're now officially in SC and spent this past week inprocessing the base. As is always the case when showing up at a new base, there are inprocessing checklists to complete and newcomer meetings to attend. In addition to this, we found a second car, purchased our baby furniture and spent six hours at another furniture store in Columbia, the states capital, getting other things we'll need for our new home...we move in 31 March! During the four years overseas, I stayed in apartments or a dorm room on base which were furnished, so there wasn't a need to buy much. Lets just say we're now thankful for zero down and zero % interest for 24 months!

Over the next couple weeks, I'll continue to inprocess and get ready to fly while waiting for my security paperwork be corrected. I was supposed to be at Luke AFB in Phoenix now attending a course, but due to this paperwork issue we flew direct to Shaw in the meantime. Plan B is now for me to attend this course in April about a week after we move into the house. I'll update more in a few weeks after we're in the house and I know what the next steps will be with my training.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Bavarian Mortor Works (BMW)

Before Lana and I flew back to the USA, we took a tour of the Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) plant. The BMW headquarters is just to the north of downtown Munich, near the Olympic complex from 1972. It was a very interesting tour showing how the BMW 3 series is made from start to finish...back in 2001, our BMW was made at the same plant. The tour started with the parts section, then moved to parts assembly. There are over 600 robots in the assembly section alone putting the different parts together...it's felt as though we were in a terminator movie of some kind with sparks flying around as the robot moved and welded.

From there we moved into the paint section, door assembly, drive train and finally the final assembly belt. There are 900 cars rolling off the assembly line each day, taking 39-40 hours each to build. Sadly, we weren't able to take any pictures during the tour, but the pictures you see are from BMW World...I think I'm sold on BMW for life!