Dear Friends and Family,
It
has been a long time since I have written and that is because we have
been so incredibly busy during the month of July. We had a lot of
visitors in Nauvoo and the sites were busy all day long giving tour
after tour. One day we gave out 951 cookies in the bakery and during
the month of July there were over 47,000 visitors in the Visitors
Center. People line up early in the morning for the carriage and wagon
rides and stand in lines for all the productions. It is an exciting
time with the Brass Band and the bagpipers in town. The pageants were
magnificent and we loved every moment of this exciting month.
We had some wonderful visitors during the month of July. We
had Faye Avarell and her sister, Amy, come for five days. It was so
much fun to show them around. The next week we had Kendra, Kim Verespey
and Caitlyn, Danny and Emma. We then had Trevor and Michelle. It is
so much fun to show our loved ones around Nauvoo as it is such a special
place and we love it here so much. Nan and Richard Hunter, Ann and
Steve Hayden and lots of Nan's grandchildren were here the first part of
July. It was all so exciting. The last night of the pageant was
Saturday night and now it is beginning to quiet down a lot. The Young
Performing Missionaries are here for one more week and then there will
just be wagon and carriage rides and "Rendezvous in Old Nauvoo." Dave's
brother and sister-in-law are coming next week-end and my friend, Liz
Semichy, is coming for eight days near the end of August. By September
it will be quiet in Nauvoo and the missionaries will then begin to bake
cookies, make bricks and prairie diamond rings, getting ready for the
thousands of visitors next summer. They also do lots of indexing and
making humanitarian kits for babies and hospitals.
Many of our friends are nearing the end of their 18 month
mission and are getting ready to go home. We will miss them so much. I
have never met this many friends in such a short amount of time. By
the end of October, there will only be a skeleton crew of missionaries
to carry on the work. Dave and I will be home from our first six months
on the 29th of September. We have very mixed feelings about leaving
but this is our call and we have things that we need to finish up and
accomplish at home. We have decided to leave our car here with our
friends and take the train home. We will then use our truck to get
around in before it is time to come back. We are coming home on the
train. It leaves from Ft. Madison (15 minutes from here) and takes us
to San Bernardino. We will see how that goes. We will leave a lot of
our stuff here and just take home our clothes.
