July is Over

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.

Our mission has been life-changing.  We have loved every moment of it.  We were just put in as assistant site leaders over the Nauvoo Visitor's Center.  We wear church clothes instead of our period clothing every day.  We are there four days a week and only one or two days in the sites.  It is not my favorite place to be but we have decided to be immediately obedient to whatever we are asked to do and so we are doing it happily.  At least we get to work together. 

We love doing "Sunset By the Mississippi" and we will really miss that when it closes this week.  We also love doing "Rendezvous."  It runs all year - rain or shine - no audience or big audience.  There are three casts this summer but the rumor is is that there will be only two in the winter.  We shall see.

We love you all and know that your thoughts and prayers are with us.  Ours are with you, also.  We pray that your lives are happy and you have had a happy summer. 

Love,

Dave and Sherry