John:  How do you decide what's home? A bit so that's that's, I suppose, what my story is about. 

Misty:  Okay. 

John: A bit of background for me and my family. My wife and I both are Texans originally, many, many generations on all sides. My kids are ninth generation Texans. 

Misty: Wow. 

John: Similar to Wyoming, there's pride in that. There's, it's interesting, sort of being settlers of a place. It's interesting deciding what roots are old and what roots are not old. 

Misty: And who decides that…

John: Exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, we had this experience where we left Texas for a job overseas. 

Misty:  Okay. 

John: And we spent a good while ⎯ seven years in the Middle East. Well, what it did for us was made us reexamine just the idea of going to take that job. Right? Made us reexamine all of the expectations of Texas. Interesting. Luckily, my family didn't put a lot of direct pressure, but there was still pressure, you know, to come back. To come back to Texas. And so when it was time for us, because our kids were of college age, it was time to get back to the States. We just sort of looked at each other. And my wife and I looked at each other and thought, where do we want to be? And we felt a little rebellious in, in the inherent, the inherent decision not to go back to Texas. Misty: Nice. 

John: And so we thought, the Mountain West! We really loved the American West, and the Mountain West would be a good place to be. And the opportunity to come to Laramie, to the university came up. So we showed up in Wyoming, and it's been about ten years ago now. When we got here, in short order, we decided this would be home. 

Misty: Okay. 

John: And so we began noticing things. 

Misty: So because you thought that this was going to be home, you paid attention in a way that you wouldn't if it was just going to be a stopgap? 

John: That's exactly right. 

Misty: Okay. That's exactly right. Wyoming is like Texas in this way. The people who have been here for a while have  certain ideas about belonging, right? And almost hierarchically, you know? So it was interesting. But what really, it was about, when we began to think of this place as home and hopefully potentially always home. 

Misty: Okay. 

John: We wanted to know the place. 

Misty:  Ah... Did you go exploring? 

John: Physically, yeah. Very much. And we love, oh, we love a road trip anyway. And so, you know, there's nothing as good as as walking the land and smelling a place and you know, one of the very most Wyoming things to us is in the warmth of the summer, being in the pines and spruce and having that smell, that pine smell that, that hits! You know, those are very Wyoming things. But it's also not just the land and the place. It's also the people. And we loved the independent mindedness of people in Wyoming for the most part. And, you know, just like any place, it's, you know, very diverse, and  we love that too. But there is a theme of being self-sufficient, independent.