Ft. Leonard Wood job offer. Move from TX??? (Kansas City, St. Louis: insurance, lawyers)

[RSTX]

My wife is a family practice doctor here in central TX (about an hour north of Austin). We are very close to Ft. Hood and she sees a fair amount of military Tri-Care insurance. She recently had a head-hunter (someone who recruits doctors for hospitals) contact her about a job at Ft. Leonard Wood in MO. The offer sounds very tempting. As with everything we are somewhat cautious about believing everything we hear.

With that said, would a couple of flat-landers with Texas accents find peace in MO? I like the outdoors while my wife likes indoor activities. She likes opera, ballet, and such. We sort of balance out. We have three kids (10, 8 and 6), so some school info would not be out of place. I'm just starting to research towns nearby. Rollo seems like a good spot. Is this a good distance from base? Hard to get in and out daily?

Thanks for any information you may be able to provide.

[ozarksboy]

Originally Posted by RSTX

With that said, would a couple of flat-landers with Texas accents find peace in MO? I like the outdoors while my wife likes indoor activities. She likes opera, ballet, and such. We sort of balance out. We have three kids (10, 8 and 6), so some school info would not be out of place. I'm just starting to research towns nearby. Rollo seems like a good spot. Is this a good distance from base? Hard to get in and out daily?

Thanks for any information you may be able to provide.

1. There's nary an opera nor ballet in either Pulaski or Phelps counties.

2. Never, ever type or say Rollo again. It is Rolla, and it is pronounced RAH-lah. Do not ever say ROW-lah in any accent, Texas or otherwise.

3. Rolla is not hard to get into or out of; sometimes there are delays on the interstate. I live in Rolla and drive to St. Robert daily; it is not a problem. I drive on the interstate in the morning when traffic is light, the patrolmen are asleep and I can drive, uh, with great rapidity. It takes me about 25 minutes to walk out my door and walk into the door where I work. In mid-afternoon when I drive home, I take Historic Route 66, except for a short stretch over the Little Piney; it takes me about 45 minutes to get home, but I dawdle, often stopping for an ice cream cone.

4. There's plenty of outdoors activities for you.

5. For high-brow artsy-culture folks like your wife, the town to live is Rolla. We even have an Arts District.
(http://www.therolladailynews.com/homepage/x1528799537/City-Council-approves-Arts-District - broken link) We're quite high-brow ourselves, so maybe we'll get us an opera or ballet eventually.

6. Rolla is halfway between Springfield and St. Louis. I know that you outsides like to do some "serious shopping" so that's where you can go, as so many of the wealthy in Rolla do. Perhaps that is why we have so many empty buildings downtown. We poor folks shop at Wal-Mart, K-mart and Aldi.

7. We don't have a Starbucks. We have a Panera Bread Co., which is a chain bakery that serves coffee. We also have a coffee shop near the campus called The Giddy Goat and a new coffee shop on Highway 63 called Harvest Coffee Co., which is my favorite.

8. We have no mall. Sorry.

9. Our city is working on a big sprawl along the interstate called the Rolla West project, which the big daddies of local government hope will lead to a mall and a Starbucks so we can be just like big highway towns.

10. Rolla has a two-layer society, especially in the schools. Way up there on the socioeconomic scale are the professors, doctors, lawyers, federal workers high on the GS rank, high-ranking support staffers at the hospital and university and scientists who work for a couple of corporations. They stick together, and their children stick together in the schools. Down here in the strata where I live are the tradesmen, the lower-paid support staff members at the hospital and the university, retail clerks (there are no factory workers here); they stick together, as do their children in the schools. We're all pretty happy the way this works, at least I am. I enjoy not having to put up with the bigwigs, and I assume they're equally happy not to have to deal with the likes of us.

Any more questions? I have two:

1. isn't Fort Hood close to Austin?
2. If so, why would you consider leaving the malls, the Starbucks and the cultural opportunities of that unique city?

[steel7]

I went to army basic training & ait at fort lost in the woods. The weather there is unlike anything i have ever seen. I was there from mar-june. Its just strange weather in ft.leonard wood,mo.

[OA 5599]

No one in Rolla, or anywhere else in that area will care that you have a Texas accent. Many people around FLW/Rolla are not originally from the area, and many of the ones that are from that area have the regional Ozarks accent/drawl. I would personally much rather live in Rolla than in the area immediately surrounding FLW...the commute won't be bad (it is actually very scenic, the whole way), and I find Rolla to be a much nicer town than St. Robert or Wanynesville.

If you are into the outdoors, the Ozarks will certainly be a nice change from Central Texas. I lived in Austin for a few years, and the Ozarks are kind of like the Hill Country, only a lot more hilly, with a lot more trees, and have a lot more public land. You will be leaving a lot behind to come to the area though...even Temple alone is 3x the size of Rolla. Rolla is a fine town, and offers a lot for what it is, but it is still only a town of 16,000 people in rural Missouri. Besides events put on in Leach Theater by the Missouri University of Science and Technology [http://leachtheatre.mst.edu/] (http://leachtheatre.mst.edu/%5D - broken link), your wife will have to relegate her love of performing arts to trips to St. Louis or Kansas City. St. Louis is about an hour and a half away and offers even more things to do than Austin (the STL metro area is nearly 3 million people).

Another thing to consider is the ice and snow. You'll have to learn to drive it in up here, especially if you wife is driving to FLW every day. I-44 is usually the first road to get cleared, but smaller roads can be ice and/or snow covered for quite some time. The weather in Missouri is certainly more volatile and prone to extremes than it is in Central Texas.

The bottom line is that I would first advise making a trip up here to see if you like the area. If you think you can tolerate living in a smaller town with less readily available access to cultural opportunities (but great access to the outdoors), then you'll probably like the area. If not, it is best to stay in Temple.

[RSTX]

Thank you for the replies.

I laughed out loud at the Rolla comment. Oops! I won't make that mistake again.

Any more questions? I have two:

1. isn't Fort Hood close to Austin?
2. If so, why would you consider leaving the malls, the Starbucks and the cultural opportunities of that unique city?

Yes, Ft Hood is close to Austin (about 60 miles).

My wife attended college at Texas A&M. [insert Paul Harvey pause for effect]

If you know anything about the TU/TAMU rivalry you'll understand. If not, then suffice to say that Austin is considered to be the butt-crack of Texas by TAMU graduates. I did not attend either school, but marrying an Aggie (slang for Agriculture and Mechanical) sort of grandfathered me in.

Aside from the college aspect, I just flat hate Austin. I do not like driving there and the only nice thing I can say is that the Austin Ballet puts on a great Nutcracker performance. Austin is full of extreme liberal ....., well, let me be nice and just say that I could care less about Austin.

So, a little about my wife and I. We both grew up in small towns (mine had ~2600 people and hers had about 500) and lived out in the country. Neither of us like large cities or lots of people. We would much rather drive to see a play or ballet every four or five months than suffer living in an urban mess that large cities create. We have had chickens and goats and love a simpler life. We do not homeschool or behave in antisocial ways, but peace and quiet are values that we appreciate. I enjoy hunting and fishing and shooting and just about anything that gets me out of the house. My wife is a little different from most women: she does not like to shop in malls. She prefers to surf the net to find what she wants. UPS is on a first-name basis with us. "Mall" is another word for "lots of irritating people in one place" to us. We won't miss any mall.

Hmm, the driving-on-ice jokes you hear about Texans are not jokes, but rather nice ways of saying we suck at it. The few times I've done it I just kept in mind the old mantra of "steady and gentle". Not necessarily slow, but easy on the throttle and no sudden motions. I guess we would get better with practice. It only ices up once every two or three years here. Snow is measured in fractions of an inch and is usually melted by noon. Our frost line is about 1".

From the few pictures I have seen the area looks beautiful. We'll see how the job offer shakes out.

Thanks again for all the help.

[OA 5599]

Originally Posted by RSTX

Thank you for the replies.

My wife attended college at Texas A&M. [insert Paul Harvey pause for effect]

If you know anything about the TU/TAMU rivalry you'll understand. If not, then suffice to say that Austin is considered to be the butt-crack of Texas by TAMU graduates. I did not attend either school, but marrying an Aggie (slang for Agriculture and Mechanical) sort of grandfathered me in.

Aside from the college aspect, I just flat hate Austin. I do not like driving there and the only nice thing I can say is that the Austin Ballet puts on a great Nutcracker performance. Austin is full of extreme liberal ....., well, let me be nice and just say that I could care less about Austin.

I'm a UT grad myself. Maybe I should try to steer you away from Missouri

An aggie once told me and some of my UT friends that she was surprised we were "so normal and didn't have long hair, and were from Austin!" I guess she hadn't been to Austin before. Most aggies I've met seem to despise UT and Austin, while Longhorns will occasionally make Aggie jokes, and concentrate more on hating OU. On a more serious note, the traffic in Austin does suck though, especially considering it isn't even that big of a city. St. Louis has much easier traffic and more courteous drivers.

Hmm, the driving-on-ice jokes you hear about Texans are not jokes, but rather nice ways of saying we suck at it. The few times I've done it I just kept in mind the old mantra of "steady and gentle". Not necessarily slow, but easy on the throttle and no sudden motions. I guess we would get better with practice. It only ices up once every two or three years here. Snow is measured in fractions of an inch and is usually melted by noon. Our frost line is about 1".

It snows and ices every winter in Missouri. The snow usually doesn't cause too many problems, but a bad ice storm can cripple the area by knocking out power, for up to weeks at a time for some people. Snow and ice can also stay on the ground for a week or more at a time...a few winters it has been on the ground for the better part of a month. However, I remember on New Year's Eve 05/06 that it was 70 degrees and sunny...Missouri has weird and unpredictable weather. I think that would be the largest shock you'd get moving here form Texas, especially when it gets really cold and icy. I mean real cold, such as a wind chill around 0 and a high of 17, not the 50 degree "cold" that I saw make most Austinites wear ski jackets and scarves

I think you'd probably like the area quite a bit though. Good luck with the job offer.