New Zealand (1 Apr 2020 – 2 Dec 2021)

We probably should add an FAQ page to this blog, because we tend to get the same questions over and over: How do you like New Zealand? What do Church History Missionaries do? Can you [...]

Smith the Grocer When we visited the Old Bank Arcade in Wellington’s central business district on Friday we noticed a bakery-café called Smith the Grocer that looked good, so we decided to go [...]

Route to Porirua After a good night’s rest, we met in the hotel lobby at 8:20 a.m. on Sunday 4 October and drove up Highway 1 to Tawa, a suburb on the north [...]

We are not sure when this tradition started, but during the two weekends a year when a general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is held, regular Sunday worship services are [...]

Route to the parking lot About mid-morning on 17 August, Barry called to let us know that Eva was not feeling well, so we would be on our own for a Monday outing. [...]

In the 1860s, in the midst of the Land Wars between the Māori Kīngitanga (Kingmen) and those loyal to the British Crown, the colonial government commissioned a gunboat that was specially designed to navigate narrow, [...]

Fickle winter weather makes planning an excursion dicey, even for just an afternoon. So with the option of bowing out if the forecast 25-percent rain became 100 percent, we made plans with Barry and Eva [...]

When Tom Andrews was a teenager in Melville, a neighborhood in the southern part of Hamilton, he started his own car restoration business. In the forty-something intervening years, his passion for automobilia has driven him [...]

In previous blog entries, we have shared basic information about the Waikato, New Zealand’s longest river. As the Waikato flows through Hamilton, it is fed by four major gully systems that comprise about 8 percent [...]

This morning’s housework involved dealing with an infestation of insects in our windowsill potted herb garden. In addition to spider mites in the basil, Nancy found two brilliant green caterpillars wrapped in fuzz that had [...]