Goodbye, Rapid City
They say true growth happens when you leave your comfort zone. They also say that if you spend more than three weeks knocking on doors in one place, the locals start recognizing you and inviting you to their barbecues – which is terrible for our sales metrics.
Sunday officially marked the arrival of The Great Migration. We spent the early morning hours packing up our entire lives, our massive boxes of books, and whatever lingering fragments of sanity we had left. It was a morning soundtracked by emotional, deeply grateful goodbyes to our absolutely saintly host families in Rapid City. These wonderful people took us in, tolerated our erratic direct-sales schedules, and treated us like their own. Saying goodbye was genuinely tough.
Leaving them felt less like a standard moving day and more like Christopher McCandless heading Into the Wild – except, you know, we had air conditioning, a fleet of sedans, and a trunk full of educational literature instead of a tragic lack of preparation. We traded the rocky peaks of Rapid City for the uncharted territory of Sioux Falls. The trek across South Dakota wasn’t just a drive; it was a transition into a wild safari of the weird, the wonderful, and the flat-out baffling.
Tales from the Turf: Cats, Roof Dogs, and Collapsing Bicycles
Matthias had the kind of week that belongs in a book. It opened with him rounding a corner and finding a cat in the middle of eating a squirrel – calmly, on a front lawn, in broad daylight. He stood there for a moment, recalibrated his understanding of American suburbia, and knocked the next door anyway. Later, a group of Native Americans stopped him on the street and asked for a photo, telling him he was simply too cute to walk past without documentation. He is not handling this memory modestly, and we fully support that. Somewhere in between, he found his favorite car – a vintage beauty in someone’s driveway that looked like it had been waiting specifically for him – and climbed right in.
While Matthias was discovering his modeling potential, Gabriel was capturing the true “Duality of Man” on the turf. He balanced his poetic side – taking breathtaking, cinematic photos of the South Dakota sunset – with his chaotic side, pairing those pristine skies with high-sass selfies and a hilarious photo pointing his backside directly at the camera to summarize his feelings on a tough rejection.
Liisa’s week produced the quote of the summer. She was walking her route when she looked up and saw two dogs standing on a roof. Not the porch. The actual roof. Just up there, watching the street, completely unbothered. Her reaction was immediate: “I knew that in the States things are different, but I did not know that they were this different.”
Luise, meanwhile, encountered a doorbell that sounds like the opening of a horror film – not a chime, not a friendly ding, that sound – and then had her bicycle fall completely apart under a well-meaning prospect who had confidently offered to fix it, declared it repaired, and taken it out for a test ride to prove his work. Full structural collapse, mid-ride, while Luise watched from the driveway. There is no photo of the exact moment, which is the only real tragedy.
Michael’s week had a quieter energy – good sky, a squirrel on a fence that looked like it owned the whole street, and a selfie with a talking parrot at someone’s door. Not a parrot making vague noise. One that made eye contact and spoke. As someone on the team put it: we came to sell books and ended up making friends with a bird.
And then, as if to bring everything back to earth – leadership arrived and filmed themselves dancing to “Wiggle.” Full commitment. Zero irony. Every single second of it.
By the Numbers
Behind the talking parrots, the imploding bicycles, and the roof-dwelling canine security guards, there is an unyielding mountain of hard work. We absolutely refused to let the anticipation of a 350-mile relocation slow down our momentum during our final days in Rapid City.
Here is exactly how the raw data from Week 3 shook out compared to our cumulative, all-time stats so far:
| Metric | Last Week (Week 3) | All Time So Far |
| Doors Knocked | 5 130 | 11 247 |
| Calls Made | 2 251 | 5 028 |
| Demos Done | 1 465 | 3 244 |
| Sitdowns | 551 | 1 139 |
Sioux Falls: Your Turn
New city, new doors, new stories already forming at the edges. Week 3 reminded us that growth doesn’t always happen at the destination – sometimes it happens on the drive, in the goodbye, in the first night somewhere new where you’re figuring it out anyway. Mari, Liisa, Luise, Parvin, Matthias, Gabriel, Michael – seven different versions of the same summer, happening inside one team of independent leaders.
Sioux Falls doesn’t know what’s coming. Same team, new town, more journey ahead. 🚗
SW Eesti 