The week in review….

We watched the inaguration and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir…

We have a wonderful family that lives in Hammerfest, the Andersens. They drive to Alta every other week for church. It is a 2 hour drive. Once a month the members from Alta drive to Hammerfest and church is held in the Andersen home. We thought it would be fun to be there on a Sunday. It proved to be a very adventuresome two days. We flew to Hammerfest on Saturday. It was the scariest landing of my life…gale force winds.

Sister Andersen met us at the airport at 2.30…it was already dark.

We had a fun evening playing games. President Hill had not played chess in 40 years. He had to concentrate very hard to keep in the game. Rachel and Sebastian were a tough pair to beat.

After our sacrament meeting on Sunday morning.

Rachel, Sebastian, and Isabella.

Leaving Hammerfest (out the back window of the car)

The road between Alta and Hammerfest was closed Saturday and Sunday morning because of avalanche danger. We held sacrament meeting in the Andersen home and the Alta members held their meeting in Alta. We bought our return tickets to fly to Oslo from Alta because they were $600 less expensive than Hammerfest. Our plan was to ride back to Alta with the members after church and have them drop us at the airport. With the road closed, we were in trouble. New tickets were over $1,000 each. There is a boat to Alta but if we did that we would not make our flight. We learned they were going to dynamite the slide area and have it cleared by 3:00. At 2:15 we started driving towards Alta….the Branch President and the missionaries started from the other side. We arrived at the point where the road was closed and sat in the car for 1.5 hours. Finally just before 5 the road opened. We met the Alta group somewhere along this snow packed highway…quickly jumped into the other car and headed towards Alta. We arrived at the airport at 6:05 just as they started boarding our flight and at 6:20 we were in the air. Whew!

Our Alta Elders…Elder Miller and Elder Wandke.

Boarding our flight from Alta….

Alta from the air….

Monday night we had visitors for dinner (2 former Norway missionaires that are now married and their cousin) and a planning meeting to prepare for the world wide missionary broadcast that was held on Wednesday night.

This wonderful group in Oslo joined over 70,000 missionaries from around the world for a missionary broadcast.

Thursday morning at the office we held a webex MLC to discuss the broadcast from the night before. What a blessing it is to be able to connect with our missionaries all over Norway from the comfort of our office in Oslo.

And…this pretty sunset from last week out our back door! Amazing!