Good evening! This has been one interesting and exciting week.

Jared and Tania arrived very late evening on Friday, March 11th. They had found a nice package deal that included the flight, hotel in Waikiki, and rental car. It was their second wedding anniversary and our birthdays, so here they came. The other two senior missionary couples took over our shifts at the Visitors’ Center which allowed us to be free from Tuesday through Saturday. We took advantage of that to do all of the important tourist things here on the Island of Oahu. Over the next few days I’ll write in more detail about many of the things we did on my blog (https://www.rnsmith.com/). The short story is that we spent one day at Pearl Harbor visiting the Battleship Arizona Memorial, the Battleship Missouri, and the Pacific Aircraft Museum. We spent an afternoon at the Polynesian Cultural Center. We visited several beaches and tried out the water (it was magnificent). We had all kinds of food (some great some, well not so great). We did a lot of shopping … without buying much. And we spent a lot of time just being together and enjoying each other’s company. We had a great week and Jared and Tania were great guinea pigs to help us know what things work and which didn’t. We learned a lot and found a lot of places that we definitely will return to over the next few months.

Meanwhile, Jared and Tania flew back home earlier today and we went back to work at the Center this afternoon. We’ve actually missed being at the Center! We’re very grateful to Elder and Sister Swinton and Elder and Sister Andrus for making the time available to us and, quite frankly, having that much time available in the future is not very likely. We’ve got a very busy week at the Center coming up as this is now Spring Break here on the Island of Oahu and several Church groups are holding Youth Conferences that involve the Visitors’ Center. We’ll be opening the center very early on a couple of days to accommodate their plans. We’re looking forward to all of that activity.

For me, the highlight of the past week was the visit to Pearl Harbor. We arrived there at about 7am and were able to get into the 8:00 tour group to go out to the Arizona Memorial. The entire tour from the introductory video, the boat ride out to the memorial, the time on the memorial, and the boat ride back was quite sobering. The Battleship Missouri was just plain amazing in its size and capability. The airplane museum was much, much better than I had expected. It took the entire day … we were finally back to the parking lot and our car by about 4pm in the afternoon … but was a day very well spent. Everyone who comes to Oahu and Honolulu should spend the day at Pearl Harbor. There were some other surprisingly good things during the week as well. For instance, there is a half-hour train ride around the Dole Pineapple Plantation that turned out to be a lot of fun and something we’d do again with future visitors. All in all, it was a good week and we really appreciate Jared and Tania spending the money and taking the time to be here with us!

Now we’re back to being full-time missionaries. Saturday, March 19th was the one-year anniversary of our arrival in Laie to begin our missionary service over here. It’s been a wonderful year and quite different from anything we had imagined before coming here. For instance, we had no idea how busy we’d be as missionaries! We knew that we’d be at the Center six days a week but had no idea how much we’d be doing when we weren’t at the Visitors’ Center. As I’m writing this, Sister Smith is just getting back from taking a group of sister missionaries to a neighboring town to attend a special event for the Tongan Church members. I’ve had my dinner … she hasn’t and it’s coming up on 9pm. There wasn’t enough room in the car for me to go! However, that has given me the time to write this weekly letter and get a few other small things taken care of. Life is good and we’re enjoying being in this little corner of the Lord’s Vineyard!