"I've been to Hollywood, I've been to Deadwood..."

We were in a hotel in Deadwood, SD, when Neil Young's song "Heart of Gold" started playing (one of my favorites!). The song mentions Deadwood and I consider myself to be the luckiest girl of all to be here with my man who has "a heart of gold". So our trip to ND has been...great (we are driving home today). It isn't as ugly here as I had imagined, everyone we met was extremely nice, the schools have no budget woes and haven't had to cut art, music, and gym like back home. The ward was amazing, 90% of them are in the same boat as Adam and I. So many women in Relief Society talked about the struggles and financial troubles they faced before moving to Williston, but now they are "happy to be here" (there were 35 ladies in RS and because the ward is growing so quickly they had us all go around and introduce themselves. Almost half of them said "and I'm happy to be here". I was amazed. Most have been in ND between 2 months and 2 years. There was another girl who was considering moving up from St. George who bore her testimony...I sat in front of her and bawled the whole time because she said everything I would have said, has the same challenges and concerns. The sweet bishop's wife talked with us afterwards and really emphasized that as hard as it would be to leave our families, the ward in Williston would quickly become our family and they really wanted us there. Adam had a cool experience in Priesthood. They asked all those local to ND to stand up. He said only 3 70-year-old guys stood. Then he asked all those who had just moved from UT to stand, it was over half. The rest were from other states and they all seemed to have a story like Adam's). On Saturday night, we went to dinner with Adam's high school buddy, Matt, and his wife, Jenni. It was a lot of fun. They showed us their house. They paid $200k for a cute little bungalow (not sure how they got such a great price, but they bought about 9 months ago). They have 4 bedrooms upstairs which they rent out for $4200! There isn't a kitchen up there or anything, but the oil guys don't care. They just need a bed and a place to keep their muddy boots (every truck, every pair of boots, every street, sidewalk and path is covered with mud). So we were going to close on the house in Colorado that we've been living in this month...but now we are considering buying a house in Williston to rent to the oil guys for $1000 a room. There is one right behind Matt & Jenni's and since she does property management, she could take care of it for us. Then if we move out there this summer maybe Adam could build a house for us. We spent a lot of our time driving around looking at new construction. There are some monster big houses I just had to post pics of. Adam says he is impressed with most of the new construction, quality stuff. Food prices are high, though. We were told that the Walmart is so understaffed that they don't have shelves, just pallets full of boxes that they cut open and let the oil guys pic through. It wasn't that bad. They did have shelves and it looked like every other Walmart with most of the same prices as CO. A few shelves were barren, like the water bottle isle, the cheese, meat, and eggs were almost wiped out...and it was crazy crowded on a Sat afternoon.
Well, I'm tired of typing all this on a tiny phone key pad ;). We still don't know if we are going to move, but now we know it would be a place we could handle, even enjoy, for a few years. It is stinking cold, tho, the wind just blows straight through you.