Amy and I finally had some time today to relax. We are in Presque Isle, Maine; this is the northern most 'city' in the Continental United States -- and so very beautiful. I had to work for about four hours this morning, then we spent the afternoon on a drive taking in all the gorgeous scenery, and enjoying what there is of the fall colors. Amy will post with pictures tomorrow.
Again I want to thank everyone for their phone calls, thoughts, emails, and most importantly prayers of help and protection for Amy and I in the past couple of weeks. My BIL Matt sent an amazing slide show of some of the devastation from Ike, and it is really just crazy how much like a war zone parts of our city look. We really were blessed in so many ways. The hand of protection covered our neighborhood leaving absolutely no damage to our home, and nothing more than some minor fence and landscape damage to some others near us. The power went out, but it came back on, and quicker than most. In fact as of yesterday 90% of our neighbors still didn't have power, but ours came on only two days after the hurricane. The inconvenience of the storm for us was really not even worth mentioning. Some of our friends and neighbors have been able to use our house to get a warm snack, cool off from the heat, play Play Station, watch movies, and most importantly for one mother of five - do laundry. I am so thankful that we were able to help all of these people -- and have no doubt that they would have done the same for us.
Amy and I were suppose to leave on a missions trip to Mexico last weekend, for obvious reasons it has been postponed. While we were at church on Sunday they spent some time talking about how our members helped the community -- among other things they had ice, water, and food trucked in from Oklahoma City and set up a distribution point serving 55,000 people in one day with all the ice, water, and food that they needed to get them through a few more days. We decided that we will sign up to be on that team for next time -- what an amazing thing to be able to help people in their time of most need.
For my birthday I asked Amy to go with me to the the Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space. She took me this weekend, IT WAS SO AMAZING. I really have an amazing wife! Not only did she go, she walked with me to all of the exhibits, she waited patiently while I read every last placard, and most importantly she did so - at least pretending - to be as excited as I was to be there. Much fun in DC, for all practical purposes this was my first trip, and very memorable. THANK YOU AMY!!
I think that is most everything that has happened since our regularly scheduled blogs have all but ceased. Amy will post tomorrow with pictures from our travels. And (assuming we have Internet when we get home) we should be back to our magical goal of three posts a week!
By the way this morning it was 26 degrees, we actually had to de-ice the airplane, and tonight we may actually turn on the heater in the hotel room -- oh the wonderful state of Maine.
Afterwards one of the employees actually remarked "Thank God this was only a 20 ton airplane, and we only had to push it a half a mile, otherwise it would have knocked us out." Well one thing is for sure the Chinese are certainly problem solvers. 
Some funny road signs:
Potato farmers:
Moose season opened on Monday. We saw a moose in an inspection station.
We can't wait to come back in the winter so that we can travel the snow mobile highways.
Looking forward to our next trip!!!
