Trip to Paris....

Texas that is.

2nd largest Paris in the world. 

As part of the job offer we got from International Paper they offered to fly both Guy and I down to the area so that we could get to know the community a little better. Most of the salaried employees live in Paris as opposed to Valliant, OK. Valliant is a town with about 700 people in it. Paris is one of the largest towns in Northeastern Texas (25,000). We flew into Dallas and made the drive north. The drive was a little less than 2 hours. Even though it was night, it was a pretty easy drive and not too bad at all. Guy thought it was easier than the drive down to his parents (1.5 hrs).

We got there on Thursday and that night we met with the local bishop to ask him about the area. The bishop and his wife had nothing but praises for Paris. They said it was a great area with all of the people being really friendly. The bishop and his family had lived in Northern Missouri for a few years so they thought it was a similar Midwest kind of nice.

3rd Largest Eiffel Tower

We checked into our hotel and pretty much crashed for the night. On Friday, Guy left early to go tour the mill (~45 min away). I stayed in the hotel and met up with one of the female engineers who started at the company a few months earlier. She took me around and gave me the grand tour of Paris. It was a lot of fun! We went to the Chamber of Commerce and got a HUGE sack of information about the area. She also took me to several of the different shops and stores so that I could get a better picture about living there. We also saw where several of the engineers and their spouses live. We ate lunch at Perry's off the square, which is pretty much a French café. The food was phenomenal.

Guy enjoyed touring the plant and seeing the area. He said the team was all friendly there and that he would be a reliability engineer. When he got home from the tour we went and drove around Paris to look at some of the houses and neighborhoods. We plan on buying a house wherever we move to so we wanted to get a look at the neighborhoods and what was in our price range.

That night we went and ate dinner with several of the employees. The company tries to get together and do something every month or do dinner or breakfast pretty often. We ate at this hamburger restaurant that was pretty good. Everything's bigger in Texas though, so the portions were large. We also went and looked at all the Christmas lights in the park. They also had Santa, the Grinch and a reindeer petting area so it was fun to get to see all of that while we were there.

Saturday morning we went and had breakfast at the local bread/pastry shop. It's a cute store and all of the breakfast dishes were delicious. We learned as well that they make a pizza every Saturday night that is brick oven style and they use the ingredients from the Farmer's market, so the flavor of pizza changes weekly.


Paris has a lot to do for a smaller town. It's about 1.5 hours south of the Ozark Mountains so there's a lot of mountain biking, rock climbing, hiking, road bike racing, kayaking, fishing and pretty much any outdoor activity that you can think of. It's also not far from Dallas, so about once a month the engineers do a group activity down there.

We fasted and prayed after our trip as well as during our trip and we both received confirmation and feel like Texas is the new place for us! We're excited for the new adventure to Paris but sad to be leaving everyone here. I'm especially sad to be leaving my job with the USDA. I have a great boss and have loved working for him as well as my group. We're excited for the new adventure though!

Paris....here we come!