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.