Settled in Scott City

After enjoying a month in our Garden City duplex, our house was ready in Scott City.  So we made the move on the first week of September from Garden City to Scott City about 50 miles away.   This is the view of our house from the front.  We are going to be glad we have a garage when the snow starts blowing, and we hear that is what it does here. It doesn't fall, it blows sideways!

Moving day with our hard-working, service-oriented Scott City elders,  Elders Hughes and Denson, helping us unload.

This was our moving van, a horse trailer!  First time for that, but it worked out great.

This is Tom Yager who owns the horse trailer and had been working on improving the house for a month to get it ready for us. He updated a lot of this for us to make it nice.  The house was built by his father in the 40's and has the most amazing use of space for storage that I have ever seen.

My favorite feature of this new house is all the trees in our huge yard.  They are very old and very tall trees and I love them!

Just below you see the side yard with more trees. As I sit in our study room I can see little squirrels scampering around in the back yard.  Would you believe we even have an albino squirrel?  He is almost pure white!  Haven't managed to get a picture of him yet though, too fast!

We have this interesting landmark just off our back fence. It is a water tower (every town has at least three of them), but this is the only blue one we have seen.  Doesn't it look like some strange alien wearing a crown?  If people are looking for our house, we just tell them we live in front of the blue water tower.

Here's a look at our new kitchen.  Since we have an arrangement as companions, I do the cooking and my companion does the cleaning up.  This guy is very happy that he has a dishwasher to help him do it.  Did you notice all those lovely cupboards and loooong counter?  At least twice what we had in the duplex.

I had to take pictures of our cupboards after we did a Sam's club stocking up.  Don't know yet how these winters will go so thought we should have plenty of food on hand just in case we can't get to the store.

And this is just a few of our cupboards.  I haven't yet been able to fill them all up.  

(I get so annoyed with this blogging when I can't get the pictures and the typing I do to line up.  Need some lessons, I guess.  But you will just have to jump around a bit to get it all cause I can't get it to do what I want it to.)

 This organ was left in the house because the former occupant (Tom's daughter) didn't have room to take it to her new house in Colby.  I am delighted and thought I would have fun practicing on it but I don't find many spare minutes to do so.  Pretty cool to have though.

Elder Riggs enjoys having a yard to get out and work in occasionally when he needs a break from studying and lesson preparation.  He pretty much has this all cleaned up now and I imagine come Spring, he will be out there planting some flowers.

We are very happy here in our 'home' in Scott City.  It feels so much homier than a duplex and within two minutes, we can be walking on a country road with milo on one side and corn on the other.  One morning I was out walking on that road by myself when it started to pour down rain. I turned around and started back the mile that I had already walked when an old farmer in a white pickup pulled up and offered me a ride.  I hopped right in and he asked me if I wasn't afraid to get in with a stranger.  I told him I had only been here a month but had learned enough to know I could trust these Kansas farmers.

  We love our little ward and the good, down-to-earth Kansas folks here. We are grateful the Lord has called us to serve in this part of His vineyard and hope that we can make a difference by our being here. 

Get the Heck Into Dodge!

This lineup of wild cowboys greets you as you are approaching Dodge City, Kansas.  It was once known as the "Wickedest Little City in America"  or "Beautiful Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier"!   Since we go to Dodge every Thursday to teach an Institute class, we decided to take in some of the sights.

This very tired, downtrodden looking Indian is just off a side road by the wild cowboys cutout.

This wild and wooly town had many famous lawmen such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the Masterson brothers.  Here is Wyatt in the main part of town and here you see Elder Riggs ready for a card game with him.

When the railroad was established here in Dodge, they began the long cattle drives from Texas.  The cowboys discovered that sometimes a long horn steer would establish himself as the leader of the herd.  When that happened, drovers often kept the steer for use on later cattle drives.  The monument here is "El Capitan"  a tribute to those longhorn cattle leaders.  I wouldn't want to mess with those horns!

These two are part of the Dodge City Trail of Fame Medallions honoring actors who played key roles in movies about Dodge City. Henry Fonda is honored for playing starred as Wyatt Earp in a 1946 movie.

James Arness played Marshall Matt Dillon in 617 episodes of Gunsmoke over a 20 year period.  

We haven't been  in to tour the Boot Hill Museum and the rebuilt fake Front Street.  The original Front Street, along the railroad track burned down a couple of times so they rebuilt it with brick buildings and just made this one for tourists.

As the cattle drives ended and the town became more civilized, they built some lovely buildings like this Andrew Carnegie Library which has now become home to the Dodge City Arts Council.

This is Dodge City Community College or DC3 as they call it for shorthand.  

This sculpture stands on the campus.  I think it is a fitting tribute to those plainswomen who weathered the constant wind and loneliness to help settle the 'west' as it was known then.

Outside of Dodge you come to this Historical Marker telling about the Santa Fe Trail which became a great commercial route between Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

You can see the actual wagon ruts still there from thousands of wagons that traveled this trail and went west from Dodge City along the north bank of the Arkansas River into Colorado.

I have more pictures to post but haven't taken them off my camera yet.  So this is probably enough  for one post.  This country is very interesting and we are enjoying getting to know the culture of the 'Old West'.  Funny, but we thought we lived in the West!

Dorothy in Oz Kansas!

Look who we met in Liberal, Kansas!  Here I am with Dorothy and her dear little Toto.

We had to drive to Liberal, about and hour and 20
minutes from Garden City, to meet the Stake President.  He suggested that we meet him there since he would be there for a ward conference.  He lives way northwest in Goodland, a little town near the Colorado border.  These Kansas folk think nothing of driving several hours for most anything.  We are getting used to it since we drive for more than an hour for all three of our institute classes.













This is the sign we spotted on the highway as we were driving around doing a little exploring.  Brannick remembered seeing it as we drove north from New Mexico, then Oklahoma, then into Kansas.  Our stake actually goes south a little further to Guymon Oklahoma.

Here we found Dorothy and Toto.  Her blue checkered dress is a little faded from the weather but she still has her ruby slippers and perky pigtails.

Here we find her friend the Scarecrow who wanted a brain. Doesn't he look like he could use one?

Here is our Tin man without any rust on him at all.  Guess he kept the oil can going through the humidity and cold winters here.  

And of course, our Cowardly Lion who looks pretty cowardly.  

This is the Museum which looked pretty interesting from the outside but it was closed since it was Sunday.  Hope we get that far south sometime again so we can check out the inside.

This is a view that takes in a lot of the Yellow Brick Road whose bricks were inscribed with donor's names.  Don't you love the sunflowers ?  They must be the state flower as we see them everywhere.

Well, there now you have taken a trip to Dorothy's Oz in Kansas. Just remember as Dorothy said, 'There's no place like Home!'  (At least I think she said that  :)

Garden City missionary digs

 This post may be a little boring for some of you but our family is always interested in what our living situation looks like.  So I will give you a tour of our Garden City Duplex before we move to Scott City in a couple of weeks.

We live about 10 minutes out of the city up on a little rise where a builder has developed about 20 duplexes and is very picky about who they rent to so it has been kept very nice.  The second garage door is our place 1244 Shannon Road, Garden City, Kansas 67846 (in case anyone wants to give the postman something to deliver to our very empty mailbox  :)

Missionary apartments don't need much in the way of furniture so this is the extent of ours in the living room.  Walls are so bare!  I miss the lovely artwork and pictures of the Savior we had in our Guatemalan temple apartment.  We also have two folding chairs and four dining room chairs if we have a Family Home Evening with our students.

We have two tables like this, one in the dining room and one in the extra bedroom which we use as a study room.  Two wooden dining room chairs in each room.  Functional, hard, and adequate.  I'm glad I stuck in that table runner from our China mission and wish I had bought some of the beautiful cloth in Guatemala.  

 This is our small but efficient kitchen.  You can see that the biggest challenge is so little counter space, so one of our first purchases was a stand for the microwave to be in the dining room to free up some counter space.

The laundry room is in the passage way from the garage to the kitchen and must include a place for the kitchen trash container as there is nowhere to put it in the kitchen.  We have a few other rooms like a small bathroom and a bedroom but they aren't anything unusual to take a picture of so I will just leave them to  your imagination.

We love to take our morning walks around the development and down the country roads.  It has been so rainy here lately that this is what we found one morning.  I thought it looked like a fairy ring.

Can't you just imagine elves cavorting around and on top of these cute things in the moonlight?

You will probably see lots of pictures of sunflowers as I love them so much.  This is just down the road apiece on the corner of Farmland Road and Shulman.  Aren't they gorgeous?

Adios Guatemala - Howdy Kansas

                        

We loved the opportunity to serve the Lord in the Quetzaltenango, Guatemala temple but unfortunately after four months we had to return to the US to get some badly needed medical care for Brannick.  These pictures above are our last day there in front of our beautiful temple saying goodbye to our temple president, President Galvez and his wife.  Also a sad farewell to our dear friends, Ken and Chrys Meadows, who were instrumental in our going to Quetzaltenango and were the ones we enjoyed so many adventures with.

On the day we left Quetzaltenango to drive to the capital, Guatemala City, the airport was closed because one of the volcanos had decided to get active.  This was taken on the way into the city.  Fortunately, the airport was open the next day when we flew out headed for the states.

It took us six months to get things straightened out with the doctors and to make sure everything was working all right. When we got the 'all clear' from the doctors, we requested  a reassignment to finish our mission and received a call to go to the Kansas Wichita Mission to teach religion classes to young single adults and college age kids.  We were delighted!

We left on Monday, August 3 to make the two day trip to Garden City, Kansas. Here is our 'Welcome to Kansas' sign.

This is one stop we made to wave goodbye to the mountains as we had heard we would no longer be seeing them on the flat plains.

And sure enough, here we see where the flat land meets the sky with no mountains in sight to hold it up!

These beautiful wild sunflowers are all along the roadsides and remind me so much of my childhood.  My mother would always put our sunflower bouquets we brought her in her prettiest vase.  These grew all along the lane in Lehi so we picked them for her often.
 

Traveling back from one of the small cities we will be teaching in, we came across fields of huge sunflowers so I couldn't resist a picture.

I thought Arizona held the award for the most beautiful sunsets and I would miss them but as we were returning from Dodge City last week, I snapped this one.  It was a beautiful sky for a long time.  We will miss some things from our home in the desert with mountains surrounding Tucson but we are finding lots of things to love here in Kansas.  So check back and you will find more as we learn about the culture in the Heartland.