New Zealand (30 Dec 2019 – 31 Mar 2020)

Blue Spring is a natural attraction along the Waihou River Walk about 70 km southeast of Hamilton that apparently is not well-known except to locals. Even Barry, a native-born Kiwi, had never heard of it until Elder and Sister T mentioned that they had been there. They had found it...

Thursday 6 February was Waitangi Day, a national holiday commemorating the signing of a treaty between the British Crown and the Maori that is considered New Zealand’s founding document. The treaty, signed at Waitangi in 1840, provided a path for New Zealand to become a unified nation-state under the protection...

Since we had had such a great experience six years ago at the island bird sanctuary of Tiritiri Matangi, which is north of Auckland, we were excited to visit the Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust, a sanctuary for wildlife and plants less than an hour southeast of Hamilton. Maungatautari (Sanctuary Mountain)...

29 January is Auckland Day, commemorating the day in 1842 when Great Britain claimed the province of Auckland for the Crown. Given that Auckland no longer belongs to the Crown and that New Zealand no longer has provinces (it’s now divided into “regions”), the holiday has no current relevance other...

The Matthew Cowley Pacific Church History Centre is closed on Sundays and Mondays. We honor Sunday as the sabbath, so we try to avoid doing anything that might be classified as work (other than necessary tasks such as basic food preparation and cleanup) or that require someone else to work...

According to Fodor’s New Zealand, “Hamilton is a city you can miss if time is tight.” We who now live in Hamilton have decided that Fodor’s advice to tourists is fine with us, if it means that we are more likely to meet real people in real-life situations than hospitality-industry...

By the time we arrived in Hamilton, we thought we had a pretty good idea of what our assignments at the Matthew Cowley Pacific Church History Centre would be, but actually, we didn’t. What we had been told was that the MCPCHC had more than 70,000 documents, photographs, and artifacts...

When Nancy was growing up her family often took Sunday afternoon drives, exploring new territory around Southern California. We decided that while in New Zealand, we would resurrect that family tradition. We wanted our first Sunday drive to be someplace interesting, but not too far. So we chose Raglan, a...

We still find it hard to fathom that when we arrived in Auckland fourteen hours after leaving San Francisco, clocks at the airport showed a thirty-two hour difference: it was 5:30 a.m. on Saturday 11 January. Our second missionary miracle is that although we’ve had to perform some mental gymnastics...

After a weekend focused on family (among other things, we took our granddaughter Farrah and her sisters to see Frozen 2 to celebrate her fourth birthday, and enjoyed an adults-only dinner out with Hillary, Jake, Nat, and Emma), we went back to full-time missionary training at 9:00 a.m. on Monday...