There’s More than Corn in Indiana.

September 7, 2013

After our training wrapped up at the end of July, Blaise and I took a week to spend time alone and then a few more days to say goodbyes to all of our friends in Houston. We left Texas on August 6th and headed back to Indiana for nearly a month of quality time with our friends and families there.

I had no idea what the month would look like, except I knew that we had to finish raising support, turn in a few papers that were almost left behind, and spend a lot of time packing (which I’ll write more on later). What I was not prepared for were the memories we would make.

My dad is a very skilled man–a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy who can fix and built just about anything. When we arrived in Indiana, my parents had just recently returned from a weekend of ziplining in Southern Indiana, so my dad got the idea to build his very own zipline. At first I thought he was completely crazy; I thought there was NO WAY I’d go on a home-made zipline. Eventually, after watching Blaise and my dad survive time after time, I did go (as did my grandma, my mom, and pretty much everyone else who came to visit us) and it was ah-MAZ-ing!

The zipline became the center of our time together. My brother, sister-in-law, and nieces came almost every day to visit and play with us, and eventually we would move from the dinner table to the zipline. We had a going-away cook out at my parents’ house, and soon after lunch the entire party migrated over to sit under the shade of the tree in which the zipline begins. We added glow sticks to the ziplining harness and ziplined at night. We added a water balloon fight to the ziplining adventure during the heat of the day. And even on our last day in the United States for two years, we each took a turn on the zipline as a final farewell to my parents’ farm.

There were other ways to play, too. We played a lot of backyard croquet, we had glow stick wars at night, and we even invented a cosmic croquet game that combined glow sticks and croquet. We went go karting and we went bowling. We ate…a LOT.

There were some serious moments, too. We celebrated Christmas, we talked at length about what life would look like in Africa, and we shopped for supplies…a LOT. We cried together and we discussed the somber need for a power of attorney and a will.

In the end, I would not have changed one second of our time in Indiana with family and friends. We have hundreds of memories to carry us through these next two years and even some bumps and bruises to prove that it wasn’t just a dream. I think that us living with my parents and seeing family every single day made saying goodbye exponentially harder, but it made our time together so much sweeter.

And to prove that there’s more than corn in Indiana (and that country folks are just plain crazy), here are some shots of our fun times together…

Here’s my dad rigging the whole thing up…