Nauvoo on the Road

There's a great program here called Nauvoo on the Road. Four or five missionary couples are sent out with a van and a trailer to schools and community events. We set up 5 stations and teach about pioneer life and skills. At the schools we set up in their gym or lunch room and the kids are divided into groups and rotate through the stations. We teach them about baking in a bustle oven, candle making, rope making, brick making and pioneer games. When we're at the schools we don't wear our name tags and we call each other Mr. & Mrs. instead of Elder & Sister. The hope is that the kids will have such a great time that they'll bring their families to Nauvoo.

Friday and Saturday (April 24,25) we got to attend the "Battle of Pea Ridge" in Keokuk, Iowa. It's only about 1/2 hour away. Every year they reinact a couple of the Civil War battles. It's a big deal and they take it very seriously. On Friday we were in a big park with 15 other stations and we were spread out. We got to meet Abraham Lincoln and hear some great banjo music and some other neat stuff. On Saturday we were in our own area. Friday was school groups and we saw 898 kids. Saturday was more like a county fair with people wandering up to see what we had to tell them. 718 people visited our stations on Saturday. We met some very interesting people. It was a good day and even though the wind picked up a few times and we had to chase some of our props, it didn't rain hard until we were just loading up the last of our gear into the trailer.

Pioneer Pastimes

Pioneer Pastimes is a really fun part of summer in Nauvoo! When we go to the summer hours sometime later in May, Pioneer Pastimes will be open 6 days a week from 10am to 4pm. We'll get to serve there 3 days a week. Right now we're just open for school groups. It's really fun. The kids (and adults) love playing old fashioned games. The stilts are a big hit and the climbing bears. We've been warned MANY times that in the summer the heat will be TERRIBLE. We're hoping that we can just ignore that and enjoy this fun site. We've been told that once the weather really gets hot another couple will be added so that we'll only be out in the heat 2 days a week. We're having a great time with this, sometimes we even let the kids play.

Nauvoo Wildlife

There are a lot of critters we've seen that we couldn't capture with the camera but here are a few we did get. You have to look closely at the picture of a field to see the coyote. On warm days we can see rows of turtles sitting on logs in the river, hopefully we'll be able to get a photo of them. Also the pelicans, eagles, cardinals and red-winged blackbirds. One critter we see a lot is the corn bug or corn beetle. It looks like a ladybug but it isn't. They are EVERYWHERE!

Home Sweet Home

Here are some photos of our wonderful pioneer home. We live in the Ashby side of the Ashby/Snow duplex. It seems like the Snow side should have been painted white but it isn't. We recently got neighbors in the Snow side. Elder and Sister Drebot from Canada. They are very nice people. We are enjoying our stay in this cute house. There's a nice feeling here, the Ashby's must have been a good family. They had 10 children when they lived in this house! Maybe where we have a kitchen and bathroom they had more bedrooms since they didn't have indoor plumbing! In the nightly performance of Rendezvous there is a whole song about the Ashby's and their 10 children.