The last day of a tumultuous year for the world, but a relatively wonderful one for us. We have traveled some. We received another life changing call from our Church to serve away from home. There have been changes in our family, including a divorce finalization, three pregnancies, significant improvements in our health and well being, and time with friends and family. The nation has elected a possibly, hopefully transitional president, but has experienced a parallel shattering of faith in our capitalist system, attributable largely to greed and deception.
Travel
Although we have been to St. George a few times during the year, the most significant ventures were to down the Subway in Zion's National Park, throughGlacier National Park and Northern Idaho in August and September and to China in October and November. All of the trips were delightful.
The Subway is a narrows canyon on the westside of the Virgin River drainage in Zions National Park. We were five, the Preece's, Steve Austin, and the two of us. We are all in pretty good shape and still got into some trouble in this spectacular canyon punctuated with choke boulders the size of houses and requiring rappelling, deep cold pools requiring intrepid swimming, boulder fields demanding agility, and steep ascents at the end of the journey requiring grit and endurance. We got into trouble fairly quickly by losing the rappelling rope at the bottom of one of the deep, frigid pools. We were thus required to rely on following groups to lend us their ropes to complete the rappells. Lacking these samaratins, we would have had few options. Steve Austin, lethaly thin, suffered a touch of hypothermia after one of the swims. Finally, Merrillee, who had forgotten to eat breakfast that morning, ran on an empty tank to the bottom of the hike. Unfortunately, she still faced a two mile ascent up a sun bleached slope before reaching the parking lot. The best she could do was execute an almost endless series of 10 step efforts followed by lengthy, emotional stops on rough sandstone boulders while Kathryn, Steve and Mike encouraged her. I had gone on ahead unknowingly and feeling that my own exhaustion would be exacerbated if I had stopped. We made it and exulted in our achievments.
The trip to Idaho and Montana was with 16 other folks who have all been friends for years, including the Preeces, Jacobsens, Pugsleys, Ellsworths, Petersens, Hammonds, Larsons, Garffs and us. Most of these folks are related either through fraternity or sorority, which I suppose is our ticket for inclusion as well. Kathryn is a sorority sister of many of the women in this group. This was to be our first trip, which was slated to be a bicycle tour of Glacier National Park and Northern Idaho. The trip was expertly planned and executed by Gary Larsen who found all the bike routes of interest, the lodgings and arranged the transportation. He volunteered his Ford 350 long bed and we volunteered to drive the beast, loaded with the partially disassembled bikes, to the meeting place near Glacier National Park. Honestly, we worried some about the well being of the group. One suffers from Parkinsons disease, another recently had had surgery related to colon cancer, others were affected by weight and other disabilities. Nonetheless, all were anxious and invested.
Highlights of the trip included two long rides (for us) or 30 and 42 miles. Also, there is a bike trail that follows the trail of the Hiawatha Rail Line, used in the past two centuries to traverse the mountains marking the boundary between northern sections of Montana and Idaho. One portion of the trail is threaded through the 2-mile tunnel at the peak of the route. Our trip was entirely downhill so Kathryn and I and Jack Hammond decided we could get better views and more exercise by hiking the 13 miles. The gentle descent revealed grand vistas of ancient trestles spanning deep gorges and provided ample evidence of the huge effort required to build the route.
On our longest ride, four of us broke, with good wishes, from the pack and set a "blistering" pace. Mike P. and Steve E. soon outdistanced us and Kathryn and I pushed as hard as I could. After a while, Kathryn pulled up along side of me and said, "We can go faster, if you want!" Please!! I was doing the best I could and she was gently loping along.
We soon discovered this to be a pretty high octane group, fearing no price. Our last hotel cost us slightly over $360 a night. I told Gary Larson that I didn't like to pay that much for a car, much less a room. Others in the group felt not the slightest disturbance in their wrinkle-free wallets. The highlight of the trip for us was easily the time Kathryn and I spent together in the truck, traversing the Bitteroots and Rockies, gasping at the scenery and beilg moved by the music we were playing. Kathryn had found some guitar renditions by Michael Dowdle of LDS church hymns. He was captured and expressed the beauty of these lyrical messages in an instrumental voice not often heard in our church circles. We were moved to tears and smiles as we absorbed the sounds and sights of that beautiful place.
Should we never travel again, our 17-day venture to China in October and November will easily suffice as one of the supreme travel adventures of our lives. The sights and sounds of our visit to Beijing, Xi'an, Chongqing, the Yangtse, Wuhan, Guilin, the Li River, Zhenzen, and Hong Kong are catalogued elsewhere (our My Pictures - Travel file) What we shall always port with us is an impression of a friendly, striving, competent, happy and outgoing people, eager to converse with us, and apparently unafraid of retribution or repression. We have made what we hope to be long-lasting relationships with these people and we will try to help in whatever ways we can.
Kathryn here.
Have you ever thrown yourself off a bridge, not knowing where you would fall? This happened to us in 2000 when we received a phone call from the secretary of Neal A. Maxwell. It informed us of an opportunity to have our names tossed into a pool to be considered for a call to be a mission president. That turned out to be a three year adventure in Moscow, Russia presiding as mission president and mission mom. It was great and TERRIFYING. We studied our guts out, learned enough Russian to survive and felt relieved when we finished. We were home free for four years. We remodeled our beloved home on Yale Avenue, and enjoyed our book group, our dinner group, hiking, exercising at Steiner, mingling with our beloved children and grandchildren, and living the good life. Our responsibilities were under control and lives were delicious. we had moved to our cozy, bucolic condo and nothing stood in the way of endless days where we could choose for ourselves each day what we wanted to do.
Then...we received ANOTHER PHONE CALL. In June of 2008. We were asked to meet with President Douglas Callister at the Joseph Smith Building on a sunny pleasant day. Pleasant? HA. We were sweating bullets. Bill Atkin, an upper, upper level in Church hierarchy presented us with an opportunity to be part of an assignment, which entailed our moving to Brussels, Belgium for 18 months to two years. I could feel the millstone dropping, dropping crashing to my feet. We haven't been active in speaking or learning Russian for four years. But, as Rachel said, "even though it will be hard to tackle another language, this is NOT an opportunity you would ever pass up. That is true.
So - We have been pursuing the learning materials, but we are not attorneys. The books we read are ponderous, heavy, and the material is obscure. We seem to be able to think about a hundred other things to do when it's time for us to go to our reading and studying. We've had one semester of Community College French (another story to write about later) and now we don't go anywhere without a stack of cards in our pockets, which are very helpful. We know we won't have anything but "tarzan french," but it is really a small part of our assignment. We are now pushing the panic button in terms of preparing ourselves. However, we have heard a rumor that the Lord qualifies those whom He calls. We are banking on that, but we know that we have many things to learn.
It's January 1st and we have had a great Christmas Holiday. We love our children and grandchildren, and anticipate that our family will continue to grow.
As for throwing ourselves off the bridge, here we go...WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Travel
Although we have been to St. George a few times during the year, the most significant ventures were to down the Subway in Zion's National Park, throughGlacier National Park and Northern Idaho in August and September and to China in October and November. All of the trips were delightful.
The Subway is a narrows canyon on the westside of the Virgin River drainage in Zions National Park. We were five, the Preece's, Steve Austin, and the two of us. We are all in pretty good shape and still got into some trouble in this spectacular canyon punctuated with choke boulders the size of houses and requiring rappelling, deep cold pools requiring intrepid swimming, boulder fields demanding agility, and steep ascents at the end of the journey requiring grit and endurance. We got into trouble fairly quickly by losing the rappelling rope at the bottom of one of the deep, frigid pools. We were thus required to rely on following groups to lend us their ropes to complete the rappells. Lacking these samaratins, we would have had few options. Steve Austin, lethaly thin, suffered a touch of hypothermia after one of the swims. Finally, Merrillee, who had forgotten to eat breakfast that morning, ran on an empty tank to the bottom of the hike. Unfortunately, she still faced a two mile ascent up a sun bleached slope before reaching the parking lot. The best she could do was execute an almost endless series of 10 step efforts followed by lengthy, emotional stops on rough sandstone boulders while Kathryn, Steve and Mike encouraged her. I had gone on ahead unknowingly and feeling that my own exhaustion would be exacerbated if I had stopped. We made it and exulted in our achievments.
The trip to Idaho and Montana was with 16 other folks who have all been friends for years, including the Preeces, Jacobsens, Pugsleys, Ellsworths, Petersens, Hammonds, Larsons, Garffs and us. Most of these folks are related either through fraternity or sorority, which I suppose is our ticket for inclusion as well. Kathryn is a sorority sister of many of the women in this group. This was to be our first trip, which was slated to be a bicycle tour of Glacier National Park and Northern Idaho. The trip was expertly planned and executed by Gary Larsen who found all the bike routes of interest, the lodgings and arranged the transportation. He volunteered his Ford 350 long bed and we volunteered to drive the beast, loaded with the partially disassembled bikes, to the meeting place near Glacier National Park. Honestly, we worried some about the well being of the group. One suffers from Parkinsons disease, another recently had had surgery related to colon cancer, others were affected by weight and other disabilities. Nonetheless, all were anxious and invested.
Highlights of the trip included two long rides (for us) or 30 and 42 miles. Also, there is a bike trail that follows the trail of the Hiawatha Rail Line, used in the past two centuries to traverse the mountains marking the boundary between northern sections of Montana and Idaho. One portion of the trail is threaded through the 2-mile tunnel at the peak of the route. Our trip was entirely downhill so Kathryn and I and Jack Hammond decided we could get better views and more exercise by hiking the 13 miles. The gentle descent revealed grand vistas of ancient trestles spanning deep gorges and provided ample evidence of the huge effort required to build the route.
On our longest ride, four of us broke, with good wishes, from the pack and set a "blistering" pace. Mike P. and Steve E. soon outdistanced us and Kathryn and I pushed as hard as I could. After a while, Kathryn pulled up along side of me and said, "We can go faster, if you want!" Please!! I was doing the best I could and she was gently loping along.
We soon discovered this to be a pretty high octane group, fearing no price. Our last hotel cost us slightly over $360 a night. I told Gary Larson that I didn't like to pay that much for a car, much less a room. Others in the group felt not the slightest disturbance in their wrinkle-free wallets. The highlight of the trip for us was easily the time Kathryn and I spent together in the truck, traversing the Bitteroots and Rockies, gasping at the scenery and beilg moved by the music we were playing. Kathryn had found some guitar renditions by Michael Dowdle of LDS church hymns. He was captured and expressed the beauty of these lyrical messages in an instrumental voice not often heard in our church circles. We were moved to tears and smiles as we absorbed the sounds and sights of that beautiful place.
Should we never travel again, our 17-day venture to China in October and November will easily suffice as one of the supreme travel adventures of our lives. The sights and sounds of our visit to Beijing, Xi'an, Chongqing, the Yangtse, Wuhan, Guilin, the Li River, Zhenzen, and Hong Kong are catalogued elsewhere (our My Pictures - Travel file) What we shall always port with us is an impression of a friendly, striving, competent, happy and outgoing people, eager to converse with us, and apparently unafraid of retribution or repression. We have made what we hope to be long-lasting relationships with these people and we will try to help in whatever ways we can.
Kathryn here.
Have you ever thrown yourself off a bridge, not knowing where you would fall? This happened to us in 2000 when we received a phone call from the secretary of Neal A. Maxwell. It informed us of an opportunity to have our names tossed into a pool to be considered for a call to be a mission president. That turned out to be a three year adventure in Moscow, Russia presiding as mission president and mission mom. It was great and TERRIFYING. We studied our guts out, learned enough Russian to survive and felt relieved when we finished. We were home free for four years. We remodeled our beloved home on Yale Avenue, and enjoyed our book group, our dinner group, hiking, exercising at Steiner, mingling with our beloved children and grandchildren, and living the good life. Our responsibilities were under control and lives were delicious. we had moved to our cozy, bucolic condo and nothing stood in the way of endless days where we could choose for ourselves each day what we wanted to do.
Then...we received ANOTHER PHONE CALL. In June of 2008. We were asked to meet with President Douglas Callister at the Joseph Smith Building on a sunny pleasant day. Pleasant? HA. We were sweating bullets. Bill Atkin, an upper, upper level in Church hierarchy presented us with an opportunity to be part of an assignment, which entailed our moving to Brussels, Belgium for 18 months to two years. I could feel the millstone dropping, dropping crashing to my feet. We haven't been active in speaking or learning Russian for four years. But, as Rachel said, "even though it will be hard to tackle another language, this is NOT an opportunity you would ever pass up. That is true.
So - We have been pursuing the learning materials, but we are not attorneys. The books we read are ponderous, heavy, and the material is obscure. We seem to be able to think about a hundred other things to do when it's time for us to go to our reading and studying. We've had one semester of Community College French (another story to write about later) and now we don't go anywhere without a stack of cards in our pockets, which are very helpful. We know we won't have anything but "tarzan french," but it is really a small part of our assignment. We are now pushing the panic button in terms of preparing ourselves. However, we have heard a rumor that the Lord qualifies those whom He calls. We are banking on that, but we know that we have many things to learn.
It's January 1st and we have had a great Christmas Holiday. We love our children and grandchildren, and anticipate that our family will continue to grow.
As for throwing ourselves off the bridge, here we go...WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
