We did have a few hours of sunshine on Monday as we left Park City and made our way back to Pocatello. Our first stop was at the Outlet Mall in Park City where we did spend a little money. I need some nice white shirts and the Van Heusen store worked well … I scored 5 shirts that’ll wear well on our mission.

We had decided we wanted to stop at Trevor’s gravesite on the way back. The first issue was finding a flower store! The nice shop near the cemetery is now a restaurant. Dang! The was followed up by not being able to find his grave. We were in the right area, but enough had changed that we couldn’t quite zero in. Even after checking with the office, we still were wandering around the general area until Nina discovered the place. We’ve now drawn maps, taken pictures, stored waypoints, and built a web page so we should never have that problem again (hopefully).

We’re spending the weekend in Park City, Utah, spending time with some of our grandchildren. We’re enjoying a few days of downtime and easing into the retirement life. We left on Friday afternoon, later than we had planned, as a few other things came up. The mail gets put in our mailbox around 3pm each day, so we went past the UPS store to check the mail, and the Big White Envelope was there! So, we brought it with us and arranged to get several of the family online while we opened and read the mission call. Interestingly, there were two letters in the envelope: One to me and one to Nina. They read almost identically. I kind of thought the letter would be addressed to both of us.

Now that we know where we’ll be living and what we’ll be doing starting March 9th, we can figure out what we’ll be doing between now and March 9th. We have some vague ideas, but now need to solidify what, when, and where.

We’ll first do an eastern tour. I’m kind of thinking we can be ready to leave by the end of this coming week. A major task to be completed this week is to sell the motorcycle. I have two very interested parties … one wants to come and buy it on Monday, the other person is out of town and can’t get there until Thursday. I need to get that sorted out as I’d like very much to have the bike sold before we leave.

For the tour … we’ll be stopping first in Green River, Wyoming and spend some time with my Favorite Brother. That could possibly be over Conference Weekend (haven’t asked him, yet). We’ll want to be somewhere to be able to see conference. We’ll be stopping by Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio for sure. Highly possible that we’ll go to South Carolina and Connecticut depending on whether or not people will be there that we want to see. Looking at RV rental sites in Arizona, it looks like there are a lot of options at very affordable prices.

Decisions, decisions. Life is good!

I took some obligatory video of opening the envelope and reading the mission call:

We now know where and when! We’ve been assigned to the Hawaii Honolulu Mission to serve in the Visitors’ Center. We’re to report to the Provo Missionary Training Center on March 9, 2015.

We can now do the clothes shopping! I think I’ll need a few short-sleeved white shirts and the second suit will be a light suit rather than a heavier, wool suit. I wonder how much it costs to ship a car to Hawaii??

Life is very, very good.

We’re spending a couple of days in Park City! Our daughter Jaelene suggested that we get together at the Marriott  Summit Watch Hotel as it’s a very family friendly location. That has proven to be true. Jaelene is here with her significant other and their four kids. Heather’s kids have come up as well along with a couple of other of Jaelene’s friends. There’ll be some fifteen people here for a very informal dinner this evening.

It has been raining all day, occasionally very hard. There’s plenty for the kids to do at the hotel, so the weather hasn’t been much of an issue.

The mission assignment paperwork has arrived. It was in the mailbox yesterday when we stopped for the mail as we drove out of town to Park City. We’ll open it up later this evening when everyone interested in the event is available, including our daughter Heather in Mumbai, India. We’ve been taking guesses as to where we’ll be going. We said in our application that we had no preference as to location and were available for the maximum length of 23 months. So far the guesses have been:

New Jersey
Ohio
Philippines
South Korea
Ghana
Berlin (or anywhere in Germany)
England
South America

Well, when the envelope is finally opened and the assignment revealed, it’ll be time for another blog entry!

Pocatello’s Mountain View Cemetery is across the street from where we have our motor home parked. The past several days, Nina and I have started our day off with a walk in the cemetery. I’ve taken a few pictures….

Today’s walk in the cemetery included a bluebird sky and just about perfect weather. The weather will be changing this evening with a cold front coming through; tomorrow will be 20° cooler than today. It’s a mile from our camper (bottom right of the image) to the far end of the cemetery (top left of the image). We usually walk for about an hour, meaning that we get around 2.5 miles in the walk.

The roads and pathways in the cemetery are well maintained and nice to walk on. The whole place is well covered with trees and the walk is nice and shady. In a week or so the leaves will start coming down with real intent and the walking may be less pleasant than it was today and earlier this week!

Fortunately there are a number of benches available throughout the cemetery. Most are placed on or around graves and put by the family. There are a couple of big benches under fir trees put there by the cemetery officials. In any regard, they are welcomed sights! This bench, however, has particular interest in that it is not only a bench, but also the headstone. The bench itself is very comfortable and Nina likes it because her feet are flat on the ground when she’s sitting on the bench. I rather like the photograph built into the back of the bench as well. I wonder what a bench/headstone like this would cost? We’ve got grave sites in Utah beside Trevor’s grave….

There are a number of family plots in the cemetery. In the oldest part of the cemetery many of the family plots are outlined with fences or cement blocks. This particular family plot is likely to be very Catholic! It’s well maintained, so there are living family members taking care of the graves and keeping thing in place, clean, and tidy.

This set of graves are distinctive! The writing on the headstones is in a very Greek font, but in English rather in Greek. The headstone on the right says that the family immigrated to the United States in 1925. There is a fairly large Greek community in Pocatello along with one of the oldest standing orthodox churches in the United States. The building is getting a much-needed facelift which is almost completed.

In the cemetery is a large section of Japanese graves. This site is not in that section (perhaps a picture in the future), but rather in a newer section. A large number of Japanese came to Pocatello in the late 1880’s to work on the railroad. There is a Japanese garden out at the airport maintained by the Japanese community here in Pocatello. And, many of these families were dramatically impacted by the (highly unjust) Japanese internment actions by the US Government during World War II.

In the center of the cemetery is the James H. Brady Memorial Chapel. The chapel is only open on Memorial Day. The rest of the year it is closed and not open to anyone. I’ve no idea why…. It seems like a delightful place to hold funerals or other events. We’ve visited on Memorial Day and found it to be a very inviting place.

I took this picture of the front door of the chapel on our walk earlier this week. The chapel is a “portal” the world-wide game called “Ingress“, to which I am a very recent recruit. Jared and Tania are fully engaged in this game and we had fun playing it while they were here visiting us in Pocatello. So, as I hacked the portal, I took a picture!


Still no mission call. We’re waiting patiently!!

We’ve finally gotten into a routine here with our motor home living such that we can take a walk each morning. The RV park is next to the Pocatello city cemetery which is a very nice place to walk. It’s just a mile from the motor home through the cemetery to the far end, so we’re getting about a two-mile walk in a little less than an hour. The weather has just been delightful and we likely have a couple more days of this before a cold front comes through.

I’ve got most of the blog working correctly. I haven’t installed any of the plugins that were installed before because the blog was likely hacked by way of one of those plugins. So, in the meantime, I have to manually post this to Facebook and Twitter whereas before I was using a plugin to do that automatically.

Still no mission call. We now go together to the mailbox so that should the big white envelope arrive, we’ll both be there. I’m still pretty convinced we won’t have the call before late next week. But, the anticipation is certainly present!

The website was hacked and almost completely destroyed. I’m in the process of putting it back together again, but it’s going to take some time.

All of the pictures are links to the explanation of the picture.