Barn Charm Tuesday - Missouri

This photo credit goes to Jori over at Hi There Cupcake. I've been reading her blog for a couple of months now and discovered that she lives in the same small town in Missouri that we lived in!

Here's the "Back Story"....so my husband and I are San Diego natives. Lived there all our lives. When my husband joined the Marine Corps right after graduation we were hoping he'd get stationed somewhere far, out of state, somewhere new...an exciting adventure...well, he ended up getting stationed in 29 Palms, Ca...a mere 3 hours from home.

After he got out we moved back to San Diego and stayed for a while. Had our first 2 children there. I was really wanting to move though and badly. I remember in 2000 he went to work in Yuma, Az. He was in the RV business and the winter in Yuma is a very good time for RV's with all the snowbirds moving down. I told him we were going to move and that was it. I wanted to move, raise the kids in "Small Town USA". I didn't know where but I knew I wanted further than the west, probably the midwest or south. I didn't think this California Girl could handle northern winters. I honed in on Missouri. Columbia to be exact. Nick has an aunt that lives there and I started researching it and loved everything I heard about it. He started submitting his resume all over and low and behold, he was hired in Missouri. Not Columbia but a couple of hours south, outside of Springfield. The dealership moved us out in the spring of 2001!

Having never lived outside of Ca before we decided that we wouldn't make any permanent decisions for at least a year. We had to stick it out for a year then we could decide if we would go back or stay. It got sticky there in the summer. I found out I was pregnant with the twins and the humidity was just AWFUL and I was ready to move back. We toughed it out and the homesickness went away.

Oh, so about the barn! Before we got to Missouri, I was reading the paper online looking for rental houses, like I said, we didn't want to make any permanent decisions for the first year. I found this great little farmhouse that sat on almost 200 acres for rent. The schools were great, which was of course my first priority. Which brings me to this barn. This was our barn! When looking at the picture, you can't see it but to the right would be our house. Then to the right of our house is the red barn which is featured in Jori's Barn Charm post for the day. When we moved to Mo, we couldn't move into the house for a couple of weeks so we had to rent a place in one of those extended stay hotels and we stored all of our belongings in that big red barn until we could move in. I can smell that smell of the barn in my mind as I sit here and type out this post. I remember moving in and Nick was already busy working. I had just found out I was pregnant, although we didn't know it was twins yet, and moving the stuff from the barn to the house by myself so that Nick didn't have to deal with that and work and killing myself in this new thing called humidity. Something we didn't have much of where we came from!

See that little shed in the back? I stored all my holiday containers in it!

Back over to the white barn in the photo above. We bought a horse, Bucky. You can see him on this blog if you do a search. He stayed in the pen there and was able to get in and out of that white barn. We moved there with 2 Rottweilers. Rock and Zeus. Our first few days there Rock was hit by a farm truck. The man that hit him worked on the farm we lived on (they raised cattle) and came running to the house to let me know he had hit Rock and came out to help me find him. Rock was ok, just a little scared, but how nice of that man to come tell me. People were just nice like that there. Not too long after that, Zeus ran off in a thunder storm. We heard that dogs get shot wandering out on farms because the farmers are afraid for their cattle so we don't know what became of Zeus but I just like to hope that someone took him in. We never saw him again. A couple of years later Rock got sick and died and is buried on the farm there.

We stayed there for a few years. By the time we started to look for a house to buy and move into, Nick was offered a good job down in Georgia so we took it and went off on a new adventure.

I know this is probably the longest Barn Charm post in its history lol but there you have the "Back Story"!

Anyways, isn't it so neat what a small world it is in the blogging community?!

And thank you so much to Jori for taking this picture for me and the picture of the big red barn! Those were our landmarks when trying to give someone directions to our house.."we live in the brick house in-between the little white barn and the big red barn"!

I have pictures I'll have to locate and scan. We lived there before I had a digital camera. I'll have to pull those out and share one of these days!

Linking to Barn Charm of course! Go check it out to see barns from all over and don't forget to stop over to Jori's place to see our other barn!