So, with that in mind, I'll commence a photo-tour of some of the "significant" places in our Wartburg lives.
This would be where the magic started. Wartburg is pretty strict about having students live on-campus all four years, so they have a variety of housing options available beyond the traditional "dorm". This is Ernst manor, which is in a square of four manors, and each building has twelve rooms, six for each gender, with a commons area in the middle (and self-contained washing/drying machines. Score!). Plus, each room is joined to another room by a connecting bathroom, so there are only four people sharing each bathroom. My sophomore year (Darrell's senior), I had a room in the upper left-hand corner while Darrell had a room in the lower right (I did count at one time--I think it was 56 steps between our rooms). Anyway, maybe I'll do a full recap of how we met some other time, but for now I'm just chatting about the places.
This bridge was located about five blocks off campus, and it was really tucked away into a residential neighborhood so there was very little traffic around it (it's really only there because the area generally floods, so they had to raise the sidewalk a little). Darrell and I used to walk here All. The. Time. It was great. We'd go for a short little walk, stop at the bridge, and just talk (usually until one of us--most of the time me--got too cold). In fact, we were down in Waverly one weekend after having been dating for four years, and Darrell faked a proposal on the bridge. I was quite the unhappy camper to say the least.
I'd post a picture of the dorm-area I lived in my junior year, but really, it'd be a waste of a picture. I was kind of having a falling out with the one roommate that I'd lived with since freshman year, and I didn't really know the other two girls, so I spent the majority of my time here. Darrell discovered toward the end of his senior year that he was actually a quarter-credit shy of graduating, so my junior year he came back to Wartburg to finish his degree (he randomly took a sign-language class) and work part-time. He lived on the upper floor of this house with one of his friends (later his best-man) and his wife. It was kind of sketch; the landlord who lived downstairs was Seventh-Day Adventist and had some really strange beliefs, plus there were always random people moving in and out of the lower "apartments", in addition to like 20 stray cats that were regularly having kittens (some of which I may or may not have befriended against Darrell's better judgement). But, it got the job done, and it was pretty close to campus so I could easily bike over there.
My senior year some soccer teammates and myself were able to get permission to move off campus, so we moved into what is fondly called "The Green House". We had five girls in this house, and it was marvelously affordable. And even closer to campus than the house Darrell was living in--I put a lot of miles on my bike in college (when it wasn't getting stolen). Darrell spent the first half of my senior year living in the brown house he was in before (only now with the world's dumbest roommate--but that's a whole different post), but then his job ended and he had to move (he ended up coming up to Sioux Falls to live with my sister because he couldn't find a job right away).
I could post an equal number of photos of homes and apartments that we've lived in in the Sioux Falls area since graduation, but that's a post for a different time. And thankfully, we're finally settled in a place with steady jobs and no prospect of moving (at least not until we decide to head out East). It's kind of a nice feeling to be able to sink our roots into a place.
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