Though hotel living sounds glamorous, it isn't!
In the past 35 days, we (myself, my husband, and our four kids) were living out of luggage, eating our body weight in fast food, and not to mention our close quarters had us ready to strangle each other.
It. Was. Rough.
But we've moved into a house in Germany...
...finally.
If you read my post about packing and movers, you already know we had to stay in a hotel for 11 days before even flying to Germany due to rental lease circumstances.
Yikes.
True story.
BEFORE THE OVERSEAS FLIGHT:
We chose to stay in the Fort Campbell area for six days before driving to Atlanta to ship our car and fly to Germany.
The six days of hotel living in Clarksville wasn't too bad. I purposely booked a cheap ass motel off the main boulevard (Wilma Rudolph) next to shopping/dining options. There was a Walmart, loads of food options, a mall, and even a small cemetery within walking distance. I also wanted it to have a pool so the kids and I had something to do during the day while my husband still had to work. It all worked out nice.
We were reimbursed by the army for 5 of the 6 nights we stayed in Clarksville.
Here's the catch:
The army will only reimburse you for up to five nights stateside, before heading to your OCONUS location.
This really sucked for us, considering the length of our stateside hotel stays were out of our control.
Once my husband was able to clear Fort Campbell and sign out, we took off to Atlanta, GA on August 5th!
Atlanta is where we had to ship our vehicle from, so we purposely booked our flight to Germany from Atlanta through SATO. We had zero arguments on their end about it.
Because I'm Captain Careful, I didn't want to ship the car on the same day of our drive from Tennessee to Georgia, nor did I want to ship the morning of our flight. The other issue was that the shipment center was not open on weekends. We wanted a buffer of time, just in case something went wrong at the shipment place (like them denying to ship because it wasn't clean enough or something whacky).
We scheduled our vehicle shipment appointment for August 7th, giving us a one day buffer if we needed it.
But...those five nights at an Atlanta Airport hotel.
Annoying.
The rooms were tiny as hell. No microwaves, even though the booking stated there would be. It was in the middle of nowhere, not even a convenient store nearby. There was one restaurant around the corner, but it was a Ruby Tuesday. One can only eat so much salad...
Before sending our car off, we bought a buttload of snacks, drinks, and randoms at a local Walmart so that we didn't have to purely rely on expensive hotel lickies and chewies.
The only thing that did work out with the hotel is that it provided free airport transportation via shuttle. So once our car shipped, we'd catch the shuttle to the airport, and ride the MARTA train to wherever: The Zoo, downtown, the aquarium. We rode the shit out of the MARTA train!
It helped prepare us for Europe, though that wasn't our intention.
*Little Known Fact: I am a subway whisperer now, but this Atlanta trip was the first time I had ever rode on underground transportation.
Oh, and the vehicle shipping center does provide a free ride to the airport via shuttle, so we had no issues getting from there back to our hotel.
Our Atlanta Reimbursement:
$0
We shelled $900 out of pocket, for our six person stay in ATL for five nights.
:-(
You can bet your bottom dollar we were happy to fly to Germany when the time came, though I was grateful to have experienced Atlanta. I had never been before.
Once in Germany, we hit another snag,
Our 'sponsor' was shitty. I give him a D+, only because he showed up.
After the longest flight myself and my kids have ever experienced (my husband has been deployed twice, so he thought it was a lovely ride), we hit the ground running: Taking a five hour bus ride from Ramstein to Grafenwoehr only an hour after landing.
We were tired, groggy, and hungry by the time we arrived to our new Bavarian duty Station.
Our sponsor barely responded to any of our emails before we had left Fort Campbell, but he did make a point to say he had us booked for on post lodging for our arrival day.
Yeah. Right.
As soon as our bus pulled up, the soldiers were required to sit through a couple briefings while the families wander around outside of the building. There is no food, no stores, nothing near by except a loud church bell.
When my husband was done with some incoming briefings, our sponsor arrived and asked us where we were booked to stay.
Seriously, dude???? YOU SAID YOU BOOKED THIS.
It was 8pm at night at this point, and we had nowhere lined up to crash!
I had to fight my feelings when standing next to him. The feeling of wanting my fist to meet his face and my knee to hit his nads.
He didn't even pay attention to the fact we were a six person family with 12 large army duffles of stuff in tow. No way his tiny car would haul us anywhere.
He should have known this. We included this info in various emails.
After he called up a dude with a truck, and another guy with a Honda Civic to help transport us, he called on post lodging (both Graf and Vilseck) and neither had availability.
Wonderful!
So as a last ditch effort, we drove to the town of Vilseck, hoping one of their guesthouses would have vacancy. One did:
Hotel Angerer.
I didn't give two shits about where we'd be staying. I was just so tired at this point. I would've slept in a box on the side of a road in this country I had never visited before.
After the sponsor and the other two people dumped us off, we realized we needed to eat dinner. With no Euro, guidance or German language knowledge, we figured out how to operate an ATM at a small bank within walking distance, and found ourselves eating our first meal in a German restaurant; the only restaurant open in town.
Hotel Angerer provided a simple German breakfast the next morning, and my husband was given the day off to adjust. It was then we began to explore our surroundings.
I will say, the first two nights at Hotel Angerer were roughhhhh. No mini fridge, no microwave. There weren't any small trash bins in the room. We were put in two separate rooms down the hall from each other, which wasn't a big deal (except that there weren't linens, towels, or pillows for more than two people per room and there was only one European King size bed in each room). Luckily I brought my laptop and had downloaded some movies on to it beforehand, so we had some entertainment. On the second morning, a rooster greeted me in the hallway. Turns out there's a small dairy farm behind the hotel. We could literally see cows staring out the barn windows at us.
On the third day of our stay, the hotel desk notified us that the large family room in the tower of the adjacent medieval building was available.
The new, huge room, was beautiful! A completely different room compared to the two other rooms we had upon arrival. Chandeliers, long windows with curtains that floated whenever a breeze came through. I loved that room, but it still lacked basic amenities we are used to stateside: Trash can, mini fridge, microwave. It even lacked a shower...but at least there was a tub.
The bad part: The cost was €100 more per night than our two shitty rooms combined.
You might have read that last part about money, and thought "Meh. The army pays for that, anyway."
Uhhhh, not in the way you think!
When staying at an off post hotel in your new overseas location of Germany, you PAY OUT OF POCKET, every ten days.
You are allowed to stay longer (and will be reimbursed for a longer period) than the 10 days IF your housing office provides you with a paper stating there is no availability for on post/ government leased housing.
How it works:
Between our checking in on the 12th and the 22nd of August (10 nights total stay, at this point), my husband had to go to housing and get this special paper, that would prove to army finance we weren't offered a home therefore allowing our reimbursement to be approved when submitted.
Housing also gives you a paper, which is like a fill-in-the-blank statement for the hotel to fill out on your ten day mark; kind of like a receipt, or proof of stay/purchase, including the total amount you paid to the hotel on day 10.
When you pay your hotel on day 10 out of pocket, you hand them the paper to fill out then (hotels close to post know what it is and have done it a million times before. Hotels close to post also assume you will be paying on day ten. Ask to be sure upon your initial arrival).
So on day ten, we paid €1800 out of pocket.
€200 for the first two nights in the crappier rooms.
€1600 for the other eight nights in the family room (rate of €200 per night)
Wish I were joking.
The manager filled out the paper, making sure not to check off "kitchenette" (which I will explain in a minute).
We then took that paper and the no availability paper from housing to finance.
And then we waited. And waited. And waited for our reimbursement.
Some people told us we would be reimbursed at random; that it would magically appear in our account within a few days.
It didn't.
When our new 10 day period began (night of the 22nd August), it started all over again at a steady rate of €200 per night.
Got another non-availability lodging waiver from housing, another fill-in-the-blank receipt form for our hotel, and hoped to God that housing would offer us something sooner than Christmas.
On Monday, September 1st, after paying another €2000 at our 20 day mark (and still no reimbursement from the first 10 nights stay), we got the call.
Housing gave us our pick of two places, and we signed the papers. They keys were handed over on Friday morning, September 5th, where we paid another €800 to check out of the hotel (with all of the appropriate waivers and forms, of course).
So our total hotel stay was €4600.00
Or the equivalent of $6,113.40 US dollars at the time.
All debited from our bank account.
That's probably the ugliest part about hotel living in Europe while waiting for housing to offer you something.
If you get stuck staying in off post lodging, you'd better have some funds in your pocket/bank account before you go!
Overall, between leaving our house in Clarksville and getting our house in Vilseck, we stayed in hotels for 35 nights, all of which we had to pay with our own funds, up front.
Eventually, the army reimbursed us for our hotel stay in Germany on September 15th, in full. We did see our Clarksville hotel reimbursement shortly after arriving to Germany.
The hardest part of staying in hotels for so long wasn't close quarters, being bored, or missing my high pressure shower head, it was honestly dealing with meals.
Eating at restaurants for just about every meal gets really old, and expensive.
After a week of staying in the Hotel Angerer in Vilseck, we purchased a 220v microwave and plugged that bitch in to at least break up the meal monotony for breakfast and lunch; buying oatmeal, Chef Boyardee, and other randoms. Mind you, we still lacked a fridge, so we had to purchase milk on a daily basis from a local market. It was kind of a "walk to the store when it's needed" type of thing. That got old, too.
Especially old on Sundays, when nothing is open.
This is a nice segue into meal reimbursements.
How It Works:
The table below is for August 2014
(Maximum Lodging is not necessarily max. The army will make exceptions for large families. I should know.
Our max for lodging at Rose Barracks was $218 per night, which our actual rate per night equaled to$289 at the time after conversion from Euro.)
But I do know that there was no leeway in meal allowance maximums. What you see is what you get according to the table.
How it is totaled is basic math.
The soldier is allotted the full local meal allowance.
The spouse is half of that amount.
Each child is 25% of the soldier's amount.
Not to exceed the daily max.
Sounds like a ton of money to be reimbursed back, but when you are living life like a gypsy...or at the grocery store every day, and eating at restaurants more often than Anthony Bourdain, it really does get spent fast.
Our average restaurant dinner meal was €60-80 Euro.
That's $80-107 bucks for a six person dinner at a restaurant. Then the remainder goes towards lunch, snacks, drinks, etc,. Lunch at a restaurant is just as expensive, I should add.
Yes. Like I said, it sounds generous, but it isn't when you realistically add it up.
If you spend way less per day (which may be possible if you have breastfeeding aged children), you make money when reimbursement hits your account.
If you spend more, you lose money.
We actually came out pretty close to even.
After buying the microwave, we did ramen and microwavable foods every other night to save some funds. We could only eat so much pizza and roast beef at nearby restaurants ever so often. Bleck.
BUT if your hotel room has a kitchenette (some type of cooking surface, like a stovetop), you get less money for meal reimbursement.
The idea is that you can cook your meals in the room, therefore spending less than people eating out all of the time.
This is where I made sure that my hotel desk lady did not mark the kitchenette box on our form for reimbursement. Some people complained that she marked it on theirs, but later I found out that some of their rooms indeed had kitchenettes. Maybe a few people didn't understand what that really meant?
Hmmm.
As for the on-post lodging folks, we had friends that came from Hawaii just a few days before we arrived. They were lucky enough to have booked their hotel ahead of time on post through their sponsor.
How nice!
They paid nothing out of pocket, yet were reimbursed for nothing. The only reimbursements they saw were for meals.
No, we didn't make any money off of our hotels stays once every reimbursement hit our account, and we had zero issues/discrepancies regarding the amounts.
But gee whiz, to not have to spend thousands of bucks and hope the army gets the paperwork straight for once ...must be nice!
So glad that's all over with!
Many people get here without realizing the expense of it all and end up taking out personal loans to get by. That's no bueno.
Save save save. As soon as you have orders to move OCONUS, start feeding the pig. I swear, you won't regret it.
And then there is moving back to the states...but I have a few years until I figure that out. I'll post about it then!
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