Trunky? You Bet!

Today it became official. We are going to fly home from London on 11 January, 2014! We already have our airline confirmations! We received them via email today from the Mission Travel Office in Utah. Very excited and sad at the same time!

We leave Cyprus for Israel on 28 December, 2013 where we will stay for eleven days (two of those days are travel time). After we are finished there we will fly to London for a five day stay, with a stop in Leeds to visit our missionary, Sister Zhang Wu. (AKA Sister Cute!)

All our travel plans to London have been finalized and we are just waiting for our hotel confirmation via our travel group to Israel. We are excited to be included on the Daniel Rona Travel Tour to Israel. Daniel Rona was born in Israel and he and his son Steven are the only LDS tour guides certified to lead tours there.

We searched diligently to find an LDS group we could travel with and were so fortunate to sign up for this tour, because it was in the exact time frame we needed. The next tour isn't until February, which is long after we were scheduled to leave Cyprus. Plus - the tour that Rona Travel provides is exactly what we want to see, since it is highly doubtful we will ever return to the Middle East. We are very pleased with all this and the way it has turned out. (Daniel Rona - right)

Most of you know we were scheduled to leave the mission on 6 January, 2014, but we were given permission by our mission president to leave two weeks early in order to meet our tour group in Israel and because we were called to serve our mission a month earlier than we had planned. We are also not being replaced by a CES missionary couple, so that makes a huge difference as well.

We are happy the new YSA couple will be able to take over our new flat that we have been enjoying for several months now. It is truly a find for the price and they will be very comfortable living in it. We also just got our new mission car about a month ago - a brand new Opal Corsa. It isn't even broken in yet, it runs well and after having a seven passenger van for so long we are grateful for the ability to park almost anywhere - which is SO difficult on the Island of Cyprus!

I will probably only make a few more posts here and then I will preserve and close this blog, since we will no longer be serving as missionaries, thus closing a most important chapter in our lives. Thanks in advance to all of you who have followed our blog and been supportive of our endeavors to serve the Lord.