Hello again,

Well summer never really arrived this year in Alaska. There was a total of 6 days of sunshine...lots of rain and cool weather. Fishing was cool too. Elder Wright fished several times and caught salmon. It was wonderful eating.

We took a trip to Fairbanks...to check missionary apartments. We love associating with them. We had the opportunity to stop at the North Pole in Alaska...we were at Santa's workshop and saw reindeer, lots of decorations, and took some pictures in Santa's sleigh.

After that we travelled across a long dirt road but saw beautiful country. We even saw a dog team practicing for the Iditarod.

We served in the office until this week. We were there nearly a year, but now we are going on an adventure. Thursday we will be flying out to......Dutch Harbor Alaska. Look on a map and see where we are! Elder Wright will be the acting Branch President. It is a wonderful opportunity to serve the Lord in the capacity as we strengthen the members so they can be leaders.

Elder Wright says he is taking me to an island in the Pacific. Too bad there aren't any palm trees. We will be in the Aleutian-Hawaiian time Zone though.

We have been blessed with three little grandsons this year and our son, Robert, and his wife and baby were sealed in the temple. These are answers to our prayers and we thank Heavenly Father for them. "because I have been given much I too must give".

We are loving this opportunity to serve, and love serving the Lord.

Summer is Passing!!

It is July 21, 2008 and it seems like summer has come and gone already. The climate has been "unusually cool" . However the days are long and light....still about 18 hours from sunrise to sunset.

Elder Wright has enjoyed fishing. The halibut is wonderful to eat. The salmon have been slow to catch but the run isn't over yet. Our friends from the Girdwood Branch invited us to pick berries with them. We attended church with them this week. As we were leaving the building a bear was in the parking lot. He was a young black bear checking out the tires or the garbage cans...I wonder how they will like us being in the berry patch! Later in the afternoon we were looking over a river up on the mountain and we spotted two more black bears through the field glasses. Again, as we walked into the brush, I wondered if a bear would stand up to greet me. It would be kind of humorous to find two missionaries in the brush all dressed up! Not.
We are loving being with the missionaries. We are in the office assisting the President and Sister Dance adjust to their new callings. It is quite a transition from one president to the next.

We were able to visit some wonderful people last night that we OYM'd (missionary talk: Open Your Mouth) in Sam's Club. We had taught them some lessons before and they backed off, but last night we stopped to visit again and they were very receptive. We are prayerful that we will be able to teach them again. In the meantime there is a chance that we could be transferred sometime in October...hopefully not to the too cold places of Alaska.

Until I write again, help the missionaries wherever you are by OYM and let them know who you talk too.

Spring is in the Air

It has been a long stretch since I posted to the blog, but here we are..

Our experiences here in Alaska have been wonderful. We have kept busy working in the office with another couple, the assistants and our mission president. We work in the office keeping track of the needs of the missionaries. Elder Wright is responsible for apartments, monthly allotments and the phones. I am the secretary for the president. We have learned a lot about the computer program used to organize the mission. There are 136 missionaries in the field here including 10 senior couples. Alaska is vast in area and we had missionaries in Barrow as well as Juneau, in Whitehorse YT Canada and Nome, Dutch Harbor and point in between. At the last transfer a missionary transferred from Barrow to Juneau, it was a distance of 1200 miles.

He went from -50 degrees to +40 degrees. Anchorage has about the same weather as Coeur d'Alene. We did have some negative temps but it lasted about a week. We live right on the ocean. When we leave our driveway on the way to the office we can see it. The church is growing here with the hard work of the missionaries as well as members. In February we had a goal of having 1000 of different faiths in church across the state, the goal was exceeded by 65 and there have been many baptisms from that event. It is wonderful to see the fruit of the efforts of everyone here. The Lord is blessing this mission.

We saw the starting of the Iditarod last week. It was quite an event and many things happened the week preceding it...a carnival in cold weather, the running of the reindeer...like the running of the bulls. There were ice sculptures, snow carving, and lots of fun things.

We visited Whittier a few weeks ago. It is a town where the ferries connect Anchorage to the southeast part of Alaska. To get there we had to drive through a tunnel that is shared by the railroad. Cars go through on the hours and trains on the half hours. It is two miles long. There isn't much at Whittier this time of year, but in the summer there are a lot of tourists. Of course that is what Alaska is about in the summer.

We attend a ward and a branch. One week we go to a branch about 30 miles south of here. We drive right along the ocean on one side and mountains on the other. The meeting is held in a catholic church building in a ski resort town. The catholic mass is held in the evening and sacrament in the morning. There are about 60 members in the area and only about 10-15 including those of us that travel there to attend. We are hoping that we can do some work out there. The other weeks we attend a ward in Anchorage where we live. Currently we are meeting in a high school, because the stake building burned down last March. The new building will be finished in September 2008. It is located right across the parking lot from the temple.

We love being here and look forward to summer. The mission president is a fisherman. He likes to take people to the Kenai so has invited us to go too. There are bears on one side of the river and fisherman on the other sharing the salmon fishing! We have moose in our backyard and have often seen them on the streets of Anchorage. We have seen dall sheep on the drive to church too.

It is beautiful in Alaska. We have a spare bedroom in our apartment...so we invite anyone to come here and stay.

We love serving a mission and working with all the elders and sisters here. It is an experience that we'd like others to have too. We encourage any who can to make the comittment. Even though we have left our family behind, we have so much to be thankful for and our blessings are innumberable as well as those of our family.

The pictures did upload! The building is the branch. The moose is from out our back window. The pictures of Elder Wright and myself are downtown nchorage Ahaving fun on P-Day

ARE WE THERE YET?

After stops in Cardston & Edmonton, Alberta we started the long drive North and West to Anchorage, AK. As we travelled the towns got smaller and farther apart. At Dawson Creek we got on the Alaska Hiway...about 1500 miles and four days later we did get there. Along the way we saw Elk, Buffalo, Caribou, Fox and Coyote and Wolf....and they stayed off the road so we didn't hit any. The big thing in Alaska on the highways is moose. On the Glenn Alenn Highway there have been 48 killed since July!!! When you hit those animals there isn't much left of the car and often the driver and animal are killed. We nearly hit one this morning on the way to church....they are long- legged, the body is part that comes through the window and it is big...luckily we saw it and stopped to let it cross safely in front of us.