End of Year Update

Merry Christmas! We hope this finds you and your family healthy and able to spend some time together this season. This fall we have enjoyed getting to see many of you and hope to see many more of you in the coming year. It has been a season of new beginnings and learning how to live in the States again.

When we arrived in October after spending a week in Arlington seeing long time friends, we decided to explore Texas which included Dinosaur Valley State Park, Fredericksburg, and Big Bend National Park. After a busy August and September, it was good for us to be out in nature and get used to living in our travel trailer. We did lots of hiking and had a great time exploring a state that we often call home.

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Mid-October we settled in Athens, Texas for a month. Noel spent a month taking RV technician classes at the National RV training academy. He is now a certified RV tech. He has already put his training to use fixing things on our RV and helping others out. Teresa spent the month tutoring online and getting her bible study Rebuild ready for publishing.

For Thanksgiving, we met up with David in Nashville and enjoyed a week with Noel’s family. Our time was spent putting a new puzzle together, doing a turkey trot designed by Papaw, and eating lots of yummy food.

December found us plus David in Idaho for two weeks. Noel’s official start date for MAF was December first. He spent two weeks learning about his role as a business analyst for the finance department. We all enjoyed seeing old friends from our time in Central Asia and spending a weekend in Hailey with Noel’s sister and her family. Since Hailey had snow, we were able to try snow shoeing for the first time.

Now are in Texas with a week long trip to Iowa planned for Christmas. The plan is to move to Arizona and California for January and February. But we have learned over the years that plans can change. In this season and in this time, we are just thankful to be closer to family and friends. We are also thankful for jobs that we can do remotely.