Although our stake president set us apart as missionaries, we're not doing any mission work yet, just traveling to Nauvoo. We don't even get our missionary tags until we get there. It's been a fun week of traveling.
Tuesday morning we went to the Oklahoma City Temple, then drove to Bentonville. It's beautiful! Although the temples have the same reverent feel and purpose, all are individual in personality. Those two places remind us we're going to do the Lord's work.
Branson was delightful, as usual. We've been to several of the bigger shows in the past, so we changed things up a bit. This time we primarily came to see the Biblical production of David (amazing, fantastic!) and then chose to also go to musical tributes for Neil Diamond, the Carpenters, BeeGees (way more falsetto than we remembered), Beach Boys, and Simon & Garfunkel. So enjoyable and, like all Branson shows, clean. Partly because of what we chose to see and partly because of the time of year, audiences were small. Golden Oldie earworms this week.
The Sight and Sound Theater puts on a Biblical story, changing stories every other year. In the past we've seen Samson and Esther. When we found out that this year's production is David, Dave decided to make sure we came to that, even before we had plans for a mission to Nauvoo. It was worth all our efforts to get here. They do a great job. The theater is big enough that soldiers on horseback and flocks of sheep don't dominate. A 22-ft. Goliath even jumped off a rock! People come in droves. Dave figured there were probably about 1200 people in the audience for our show in a theater that can accommodate nearly twice that, and the next day they had three performances. That's a lot of people! It's nice to be in a setting like that.
Above all, the faith and reliance of the children of Israel on the Lord shone through. Praising God like they did was a great lead-in to the Easter weekend.
When we said the adventure begins, we didn't know how true that would be. Arline's symptoms got worse, so we went to an urgent care and then got sent to the ER for scans. Since all else has failed, the doc said we need to consider other issues, like thyroid or cancer. Because of a very long wait in the ER, that little adventure took over 9 hours. We got two things out of it: the scan showed everything is fine (relief) and calls from the state epidemiologists in Missouri AND Utah saying we've been exposed to measles. Because we think we both had measles as kids, we probably don't have to worry.
While we were waiting at the temple in Bentonville, we ran the battery down in the car. Yay for AAA. Then, when we were in the middle of farm country and little else, our credit card was declined at the gas pumps. Fortunately, the clerk was able to override it and we got enough gas to get to Nauvoo. Now we're wondering what other excitement awaits.
A few minutes before we got to Nauvoo, we let our leader/mentor know we were close. When we got to our apartment, senior missionaries came over to welcome us and help us unload. What took Dave 2 days to load in the car was unloaded in 4 minutes. Now we just have to figure out where to put everything. There are some wonderful people here. It will be a great summer.
Here is the moving crew in front of our apartment. We have the bottom floor.
At a welcome dinner Saturday, they announced a new couple, the Wallentines. He's my third cousin! Our great-grandpa was Robert Wallentine. They will be teamsters, so we won't see them much, but it was fun to have an immediate connection.
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