I’ve posted many times as we’ve visited the Imperial Sand Dunes with the missionaries. As we enter the final weeks of our mission, we realized today’s trip to the Dunes would be our last. Fortunately it was just as fun as the others.
Elder Rogers impressed us all with a standing backflip off a high dune:
Not to be outdone, Elder Legg did the same but added a 180-degree twist:
I love Elder Tasi’s expression in the background. Apparently he’s not impressed. Elder Legg then improved on his technique by launching himself off the back of Elder Ginos:
I noticed Sister Johnson using an honest-to-goodness SLR camera– not a digital one. I asked to see it, and was shocked to recognize it: an ancient Pentax K-1000!
Here’s the picture from my 16th birthday in 1988 when I opened my Pentax K-1000:
It was awesome to see someone with the same camera, almost forty years later, actually using it!
The ladies all posed for a picture.
I’ve grown to love the Dunes, and how they just continue all the way to the horizon.
Even more, I’ve grown to love these amazing young missionaries. They’re so much fun.
Today we took an unusual route to San Diego, winding through the Anza-Borrego Desert. The desert landscape is littered with ocotillo plants, which are huge, spiky, and spindly. For most of the year they all look quite dead, but as spring marches on, they’re beginning to bloom.
At sunset they look particularly interesting.
As we continued on, and the sun sank, I stopped to snap a picture along the lonely highway.
The desert has a certain beauty all its own. I still love mountains, and lakes, and even oceans, but at times I long for the desert with its rocks and odd plants.
We made first contact with the senior missionary couple who will be replacing us in El Centro in about four months. We had a great conversation with them, answering a lot of the same questions we’d asked almost a year ago. One of those questions was: what’s the apartment like?
The best answer seemed to be to send them some photos of The Pad. I figured I’d post them here as a way to remember this cozy little place we’ve been living in since May.
It’s been a great place to live while we’ve been serving. Of course it’s nothing like the comfort of home, but we can’t complain.
I’ve said before that orange juice is the “nectar of the gods”, and it remains my favorite drink. Today my friend Stephen dropped by with two gallons of fresh-picked fresh-squeezed juice. He has several orange trees in his yard, and this is the end of the citrus season, so he juiced what was left on the branches.
It’s so, so good! Although I don’t mind drinking orange juice from concentrate– and have been doing so for my entire life– there’s something magical about juice right from the tree. Thanks, Stephen!
Missionaries are famous for wearing out their shoes, since they walk all day, every day. Pepper and I don’t walk quite that much; our mission responsibilities are pretty different. But for the past eleven months, I’ve been wearing a shirt and tie (and dress shoes) for many hours every day. This is new for me, and time has taken its inevitable toll.
I bought these shoes at the start of our mission, and they’re really comfortable. They’re not full-on proper dress shoes, but they suit my style. In any case, after eleven months the soles are both cracked halfway open, the insole is worn through, and the laces are fraying. It’s time to retire them. I picked up a new pair of the same shoes and can finish my mission with them. And I’ll even have them handy as I continue “civilian” life back home!
In a weird way, it feels good to know you’ve worked hard enough to wear out a pair of shoes.
Since we were in San Diego today for our departing testimonies, naturally we decided to do a bit more before heading back to the Valley. Today we chose Torrey Pines. It’s a great spot for an easy hike along shoreline cliffs.
Down at the beach, there are awesome colorful rocks (although not quite as awesome as those at Lake McDonald).
We just enjoyed sitting on the beach for a while, watching the surf and soaking up the sun. What a great time in a beautiful place.
As missionaries reach the end of their scheduled mission service, they’re invited to share a “departing testimony”. It’s an opportunity for them to stand in front of all 230 other San Diego missionaries and share their thoughts and feelings about their service and their faith. Transfers happen every sixth Wednesday, and these testimonies are given the prior day as a “goodbye” just before the missionary travels back home. Often they’re quite emotional.
Senior missionaries are slightly different: we don’t have regular transfers. We come and go according to a different schedule. But we’re still invited to give our departing testimonies alongside the young missionaries, at the last meeting before we leave. For us, it happened to fall today even though we’ll still be missionaries for another five weeks. Just a quirk of the calendar.
So we drove into San Diego for the big day, enjoyed seeing so many of our young friends, and shared our testimonies. Of course we took pictures with as many of them as we could.
We’re wearing handmade leis that one of the missionaries prepares for all those who are leaving. It’s a nice gesture and a long-standing tradition.
Many of our friends told us how sad they felt to see us leave, even though we’ll be around for another month and will probably see many of them again in different settings. But it’s true that for some, it’ll be the last time we’re together. It’s always hard to say goodbye.
Julian is one of the places everyone tells us we need to visit before we leave southern California. It’s a little town tucked up in the mountains– a bit of a drive for us, but a trip we’ve been wanting to make. We called our friends the Knudsens and Woolstons (who all live in San Diego) and arranged to meet in Julian today.
We started off with lunch at a local pizza parlor. It was splendid… probably the best pizza I’ve had since arriving in California!
Then we headed over to the Eagle Mining Company, which is an abandoned gold mine dating back to the 1850’s (the fabled Gold Rush). The tour was really interesting, and led by a grizzled old guy who absolutely looked like a prospector.
After we came back out of the mine, he showed us how to pan for gold. The company pulls water from the nearby river, where gold flecks can still be found. With the help of a plastic pan, you swish the water around in a certain way…
… and you’ll find some little bits of gold!
Yes, those shiny dots are really gold. It’s not enough to really amount to anything, but it was pretty cool to see how the process worked.
We finished at the mine and wandered around town. It’s a charming place, and of course this little tourist spot was impossible to resist:
After dinner at a local bar and grill, we headed our separate ways. It was a great day, and an awesome little town.
A few months ago, some of our young adult friends were talking about how awesome it would be to attend General Conference in person. It’s a semi-annual event, every April and October, held in Salt Lake City. Around twenty thousand Church members can attend to watch the events in person; the remaining millions watch online. It’s tricky to get tickets, because they’re so limited in number for a worldwide Church where many, many people want to attend Conference.
With the help of our bishop, we requested some tickets. The weeks passed, and to our surprise, he was able to secure eleven of them! We only needed six, so we wondered what we’d do with the other five. More on that in a bit.
Transportation was the next issue. We decided to rent a minivan so everyone could ride together. What about housing in Utah? Well, it happens we own a townhome there! Zack is living in it, but there’s plenty of room for our little group. All the hurdles had been cleared. We were off to Conference!
It’s a seven-hundred-mile drive from El Centro up to our townhome. Ugh. Along the way, we stopped for lunch in Las Vegas and introduced the ladies to Cheba Hut (the same one we’d visited on our way to California in May).
In Utah, we encountered some snow! All of our young friends grew up in the heat of the Valley, and some of them had never experienced snow in their lives. They were so excited.
As the drive wore on, we were treated to a nice sunset.
Our tickets were for the Saturday afternoon session, so we decided to make a big breakfast beforehand. Pepper and I walked over to the grocery store to pick up some food, and bumped into one of my former seminary students! Morgan was in my Longmont class way back in 2018, and amazingly we still recognized each other. Small world, right? Since we had those extra tickets, we offered three to her and her husband and sister.
We arrived early and wandered around Temple Square in the crisp spring sunshine.
The Salt Lake City Temple is still under renovation!
Eventually we made our way into the Conference Center, which was really nice. It seats a little over twenty thousand people, and it’s designed specifically for these conferences (although it serves other purposes throughout the year). We found our balcony seats and settled in.
What about our remaining two tickets? Well, we’d offered one to Zack a few weeks ago when we knew we’d have a spare, and that left one final ticket. He asked his friend Afton if she’d like to join us, and she did! It was fun to meet her.
The experience of watching General Conference in person was really cool. Obviously it’s fine to see it via internet video, but there’s a special spirit in that building. It’s amazing to be united in purpose with twenty thousand other believers (the seats were all full), and to see the Apostles and other Church leaders in the flesh.
Afterward we went to the roof and watched the grounds below. So many people!
On Sunday we drove back home… another seven hundred miles through Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and finally California. Coincidentally, we’ll be on these same roads in a little over a month when we head home from our mission.
I’m glad we were able to go. And I’m especially glad we could do it with these four amazing women who, a few months before, just had a dream of making it happen.
I saw this sign at a Via 313 pizzeria in Orem tonight:
There’s a lot going on in the world these days, and it’s so easy to get caught up in anger and frustration and despair. But, as this sign reminds me, things will work out. Tenga fe.
