Welcome to Rolla and St. James
Over the last year we have done a lot of planning to get ready for the travel life. Reducing our belongings down to what fits in the car has allowed us to really look at what we need in our lives. The experience of uprooting our home and moving it across the country will bring us countless lessons for our upcoming moves. It has taken quite a lot of questions being answered and objectives being accomplished to get us to this point, but here we are. We have set our sails for our first contract spot. Amity will be working in an outpatient clinic at Mecy Therapy Services in Rolla, Missouri. We will be living 12 miles away in the small township of St. James, MO.
Mile: 4348
Quote of the Blog:"You can start anew at any given moment. Life is just the passage of time and it’s up to you to pass it as you please.” - Charlotte Eriksson
Song of the Blog: “Our House” - Madness
After a quick breakfast with Amity’s dad Mike and Uncle Rick, we hit the road. Getting to St. James from Kirksville is quite simple, with Columbia, MO on the way. We stopped in quickly for a little puppy time, as Kelsey’s parents have Bernese Mountain Dog puppies. Always great to get a little puppy therapy in while making a big move!! By the middle of the afternoon, we found ourselves pulling into our new home on the south end of St. James, MO that is referred to as, “The Winchester.” To simplify our lives, we decided to only rent fully furnished rentals. Amity found this house on AirBnB. Upon our first observation, we are very happy with this place.
We intentionally gave ourselves a few days to get settled in and familiarize ourselves with the area before Amity started working. I on the other hand am still grinding away selling ski gear with Curated. It’s turning out to be a much stronger income source than I thought it would be, which is great! After getting ourselves unpacked, we decided to see what the drive to Amity’s clinic was like. Rolla is a quick 10-minute drive down Interstate 44 (properly pronounced “farty-far”). Rolla hosts the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Lots of smart engineering type people here, mixed with your classic Midwest style locals. Rolla has a high population of Irish descendants. We have heard that there will be one hell of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration and we are so looking forward to that! People are already talking about it and making plans! Rumor has it that the whole town of Rolla has ran out of beer on St. Patrick’s day in the past. Stay tuned for our St. Patrick’s Day post in a few months!
What would be a more fitting start for us living in an Irish area, than to find an Irish tap house called Hopper’s Pub. This is a really cool spot in downtown Rolla. One of the big things about the greater Rolla/St James area is that Route 66 passes through here, so as you can imagine EVERYTHING is marketed towards that. That is no different here at Hopper’s Pub. They actually have 66 beers on tap. Amity was very happy to see that Missouri Basketball was on, because they are actually doing really well this year. We quickly realized we had stumbled in there during a Trivia Night. Amity was not having it (I think she was intimidated by all of the engineering brains), so I played by myself. I won every round!!! Actually, no I didn’t. Amity was right. These people were very smart! Other than the dog round, which I killed it in! Too much fun for one night, so we headed back to our new home.
The next day we had a couple things to do in order to settle in. We needed to unpack, we desperately needed to go to the grocery store and we wanted to adventure around the area a little. Not having a lot, made unpacking quite quick. This allowed us to head out and explore quicker than expected. We decided to go back down to a spring we had discovered when quickly stopping in after our adventure to Springfield in December. This area is known as Maramec Spring Park, and it is only a 10-minute drive from our house. In Missouri, there are a lot of caves and natural springs. It pumps out around 95 million gallons of water every day, and this water is a beautiful turquoise blue (reminiscent of the glacier waters up in Montana). We are blown away to see the clarity here.
Another amazing element of these large springs, is that the Missouri Department of Conservation has made them into Trout Parks to help maintain the local trout population in the river systems down here. This makes for some amazing fishing opportunities. I had probably done too much research for my own good, but it was well worth it! I would have never thought that fly fishing in January would have been this pleasant! With the temps in the mid 50’s it was as if I was fishing on a mediocre spring day in Montana.
As much as I wanted to continue, we needed to continue on with our day. St. James is a very small town of just over 6,000 people. This means that getting any kind of life’s necessities is best done in Rolla. So, we headed back over to “the big city” to get what we needed. Life feels a little surreal right now. The overwhelming feeling that our big plan is now actually a reality. We have a lot to learn about our new home. So far, we can tell you that we are very excited to finally be doing this. There is a lot to explore and do here, we cannot wait to sink out teeth into the area!