Today has been a delightfully restful day. For the first time in several weeks we didn’t need to go to Honolulu to either the Honolulu Hawaii Mission Office and/or to the VA Medical Center. In fact, until 8pm this evening we had no appointments on our calendar or anywhere we needed to be. So, this morning we took care of some household cleaning and laundry things, had a leisurely lunch, and then took a drive to the north and west as far as the road goes (it used to go all the way around the point on the west of Oahu and down the coast to Pearl Harbor. However, a hurricane some twenty or so years ago washed out the road at the point and it’s never been repaired). We made several stops including at Shark’s Cove (no known reason for the name, sharks are rarely if ever seen on the north side of Oahu) to catch a picture of a giant sea turtle sunning on the beach.

We also stopped in Hale’ewa for some ice cream and by the Dillingham Airfield to watch some kite surfers do their thing out in the bay. We got back home about 6pm for a nice dinner. Then at 8pm we were over at the Visitors’ Center for song practice.

This coming Sunday afternoon at 6pm the sister missionaries are putting on another musical fireside at the Visitors’ Center. These events are very popular and we have some incredibly talented sisters. They are singing the closing number all together, an arrangement of Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes” and I’m accompanying them on the piano. It’s a difficult song and has required a fair amount of practice. It came together quite well this evening so I’m very hopeful for Sunday!

Tomorrow morning we’re back to the Visitors’ Center in the morning and coordinating trams in the evening. I’ve remarked before that we seem to have gotten quite a bit busier at the Visitors’ Center over the past couple of months. The latest statistics are evidence that is the case!

The chart to the left shows the monthly visitors counts for the past eighteen months. 13,290 had been the record number of visitors until last May when the count started a dramatic climb. Two changes are driving that significant increase in visitors. First, working with the Polynesian Cultural Center, the dinner luau’s are now ending by 6:15pm meaning that the luau guests have time to get on the last two trams, 6:20pm and 6:40pm. Enough of them are taking advantage of the tram tour that we’ve had to add two twenty-five passenger busses to the last two tours.

The chart to the right shows the huge impact of the small change in schedule at the Polynesian Cultural Center with the number of tram visitors more than doubling the previous averages.

The second change has to do with the Chinese tour groups that have started coming to the Visitors’ Center in the early afternoon. Between 100 and 200 mainland Chinese visitors are now coming on tour busses and more than 5,000 came in the month of June. The word spread among the tour guides and tour companies that the Visitors’ Center is a beautiful place where there are Chinese-speaking people available to help their guests … all at no charge. The Chinese people really love anything that is free! That’s also evidenced by how much literature and how many Books of Mormon in the Chinese language they’ve taken. For instance, we’ve passed out more than ten cases of Simplified Chinese Books of Mormon in the past three weeks alone. Prior to April of this year I don’t remember a single Chinese tour bus stopping at the Visitors’ Center long enough for us to even tell them that they were welcome guests. One afternoon the Visitors’ Center Director just happened to be out front when a tour bus stopped in the traffic circle in front of the Center and talked with the tour guide briefly. He learned that they weren’t stopping because (1) they didn’t know anything about the place and (2) didn’t want to overwhelm us with forty or fifty people getting off the bus at one time. That started the change and within a couple of weeks five or ten busses were stopping, now growing to ten to fifteen busses a day. And, a couple of other tour companies catering to other nationalities have heard about us and are starting to stop to let their guests come into the Center, including the French and the Koreans.

So, a nice, restful Preparation Day is a delight … and we’re recharged and ready for another week at the Center and at the PCC. Life is grand!

Ta ta for now!