We were living out of boxes and adjusting to the shock of the "new world" of Louisiana last year on this day. May 30 marked our one-year anniversary of moving to Louisiana.
Using mapquest to find friends' houses (you can't just see houses off the road here on account of the trees), learning how to drive in the organized chaos of Louisiana roads and highways, living with BIG and STRANGE bugs and critters, the humidity and translating southern language has become second-nature to us now. Immersion into a new culture is certainly the best way to learn it!
Many of you are probably as surprised as we are that we have not moved yet again with Travis's company. Travis and I talked about this last night. We WANT to be somewhere, ANYWHERE, for a few years! There is as much value in stability as there in the flexibility of moving. We'd just like to try the former for a change. Only God knows where our journey will lead, however.
Travis still has plenty of safety "reform" to do here in the Louisiana Mississippi (River) Gulf ADM locations. The Mississippi Gulf locations' turnaround will take time, as the grain division just purchased the facilities last year. Travis and his assistants have made phenomenal headway in the last year, however, and he's starting to see his ultimate hope for the facilities come through. He's seeing more and more employees taking safety personally and seriously and it is becoming a working lifestyle for them, not just a formality for OSHA or documentation purposes!
We have been slow to find our "fit" in the area, but "fitting in" was worth the wait, as we've slowly but surely made some fantastic friends. We think we've finally found the church where we "belong." We attended our first church here for six months before deciding we needed a better "fit" for the family. We also now have doctors and dentists established, Louisiana tags on our vehicles AND the ever-so-important FLOOD INSURANCE!
We still miss our families and friends in Kansas and wish we could see them more often. Travis's regional managerial responsibilities and three weeks of vacation make getting away for a significant amount of time as often as we'd like very difficult just for the fact that getting to Kansas takes two whole days. We are thankful for our families coming to visit us here and for the couple of times we've visited my family in Kansas. We are looking forward to a Davis visit/family reunion this summer! Yeah!
God bless Kansas and God bless Louisiana! We love you both!
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