Happy Easter!

Dearest family,

Happy Easter!

I hope you have a fun day with your families, and that the kids got to go hunt Easter Eggs yesterday. I hope the weather was good for you, it was beautiful here. It got up to 47 degrees, the warmest day we’ve had so far.  Several people were out raking the thatch on their lawns. It is really nice to be able to go out without our heavy coats on, usually just wear a sweater or light jacket.

We drove over to Skagway again yesterday, took baptismal clothing over for Brandy Mayo who was able to get baptized finally. She is pretty excited, as she has waited a whole year. It was really a nice service, her parents attended and it was good to meet them. She will be confirmed today during Sacrament meeting, but we didn’t have a place to stay the night, so we came on back over. Skagway is a town of only about 800 people during the off-season, but the big cruise ships start coming in the first of May (I think the first one is May 5^th), and the town will swell to about 5000 for the summer. It’s a fun tourist town, there are lots of fun shops and things to see from the gold rush era, and it’s one of the major stops on the cruise lines. Reminds me a lot of Virginia City, Nevada or the gold towns of California. Some of the little shops were starting to open, and we thought we’d have time to look at some yesterday, but we got hung up at the US border crossing for about an hour, so we didn’t have time. A lot of people were on the road for the holiday, and they only had one border guy there, so it took a long time to process the 15 or 20 cars in front of us. We made it about 15 minutes before the baptism, and we had all the baptismal clothes. Skagway is such a small branch they don’t have many of their own, and they are almost all in kids sizes. They only have about 25 people who attend in the winter, but between 75-100 each week during the tourist season. They have quite a few young people from BYU and BYU-I that come to work here in the summer, kind of like Warren did in Juneau, I guess.

The work is a little slower this week, we ended up only teaching about 5 lessons this week, but we had some great visits with some of the less-active and part-member families in our branch. They are really good people, but many of them have just let the things they want most get in the way of the things that matter most. It’s so easy to get into the mindset of the world. The family we are living with is putting on an Easter dinner for anyone in the branch that doesn’t have family plans, with ham and turkey and all the trimmings. Mom is helping her with it, as she hasn’t done a feed for that many people yet. It should be a fun thing, though we have no idea how many are going to show up. Mom cooked an extra ham just in case the ones they have don’t end up being enough.

Well, I guess I’d better get ready for church. We didn’t have our early correlation meeting today because it’s Easter, which is kind of nice because it gives us extra time this morning. Sacrament meeting isn’t until 10:00 a.m. but that’s only an hour away, so I’d better get ready.

We sure love all of you, and hope you have a great day. Remember that our hearts are with you, and that we love and miss you all! Be sure to give the grand kids our hugs and loves.

Love, Dad and Mom