Our Journey Begins

     We finally received our itinerary to travel to Cambodia on Monday, July 26.  This gives us the opportunity to visit David and Jennifer to celebrate their 50th Wedding Anniversary before we leave. ... another tender mercy from our Heavenly Father!  Alicia and her husband and family has been here with us for the last 3 weeks, they will drive our van home to Utah on the way to visit David's family, our nephew, Quinton flew from Utah to drive our car to Utah so Ada's husband, Andrew, can use our car while we are gone.  Everything worked out as planned.  We had a nice visit with all the extended family that came to the celebration.  We got to say our goodbyes plus we didn't have to give our farewell talks at church because we were out of town!

Group picture at David/Jennifer 
50th Wedding Anniversary 

Lisa, Brenda, Mason, Quinton,
Monisa, Amanda, Linsie & Stanley

Another angle of same group

Last family pic with Alicia and Brenda

Columbia River Temple, We
were able to doing some sealing work

Going to miss this little one the most!

Michael family, Nora with David & Jennifer

   Our flight to Cambodia took over 19 hours, 12 hours from Seattle to Seoul, Korea with 2 hours layover, then another 5 hours from Korea to Cambodia.  Our first leg of the flight was quite pleasant.  Because it was not a full flight, we were able to stretch out and takes two rows of seats (4 seats), I slept most of the first leg, then stayed up for the last 7 hours while layover in Korea and flying into Cambodia.  It was a little bit chaotic at the immigration (not really a formal one like most other countries we had been). There was tables line up with plexi-glass dividers, we handed over our papers, Covid test result, insurance certificate, and hotel reservation to them.  They were giving us problem because our hotel reservation do not have a QR code on them, but they were able to find the driver from Marriott, he certified that we indeed has a reservation, signed out papers and stamped it for us.  We were able to get thru.  We took another Covid test prior to boarding our transport to the hotel.  

    We will be in quarantine for the 14 full days, which mean we will not be able to leave our room until day 15 after our arrival ... I hope we will endure!!!

Putting the name tag one

One last picture in front of our home

 

luggages in car, ready to go

Jessica Chi gave us a ride to airport

Ready for take off

On our way to gate 253 in Seoul,
Robot luggage carrier

nice deco in Korea airport

  

WHAT!!! mission again?! We just bought a house!

Back in October, 2020, we were approached by President Phillips of the China Hong Kong mission to go serve with them.  The situation was that the mission was opening up and with the anticipated influx of new missionaries, President Phillips really needed some senior missionaries to support him, so we get our paperwork ready and submitted it.  For some reason it took forever to go thru review, then we got a call right after Christmas that because of new variants of Covid 19, Hong Kong went to 3 weeks quarantine instead of 2 and not many new missionaries were coming, President Phillips said he would have us flied directly to Macau and stayed there at least 6 months and the new mission president will decide what to do with us after that.  We decide then that it would be wise to postpone,  We pulled our papers.

Then we decided since we are not going on another mission anytime soon, we might as well buy a house in St. George, which we did.  Three days after we signed paper to buy a home in St. George while we were on family vacation to Florida, we got an email from Elder Peter Meurs, second counselor in the Asia Area Presidency, asking us to serve in Cambodia.

It took us a week to figure out how to get everything worked out; what are we going to do with the house we just bought?  Do we back out and loss our earnest money?  Do we have someone to take care of our Washington home?  I believe God works in mysterious ways, sometimes we need to have eyes to see His hands in our lives!

We told our agent our situation, it happens that the listing agent for the seller of the home we purchased live next door, he also has a rental business, within a week of our informing him our situation, he got permission from the sellers to allow us to list the house for rent and within 2 weeks before we close on the home, he already has 3 interest on the property.  So, our worry about St. George home is gone!  As for our Seattle home, Patrick Oliver and his wife were going to rent from us in January, they are still interested.  We signed agreement once we received our call to Cambodia.  They are going to stay at our house for the next 18 months.

This time our papers came thru pretty quickly once we were able to clear Medical.  Our call came 3 weeks after we turned it in and our visas to Cambodia took 9 days!  Now we are ready to go!

We hope to be able to leave within the next 10 days ... lots of packing and cleaning to do, tests to be done so we could travel ... Let our adventure begin ...  Cambodia 7/2021 to 1/2023. 

Our St. George home