We made it!!!

 We left the Provo MTC on Monday, February 31st.
Flew on Air New Zealand to Auckland, NZ and landed on Wednesday, February 2nd!
We skipped a day!! It was a long flight, but didn't seem so bad since we both took an Ambien!

 This is a picture with President and Sister Porter.  They took us out to dinner the first night of our arrival.  We stayed in a "hole in the wall" motel until Thursday.  We attended a district leadership meeting our first day.  It was wonderful!  President Porter is a very talented and inspirational speaker.  Sister Porter reminds us of Heidi Dahl from Santa Clara (not her looks, but her voice and mannerisms are exactly like Heidi!) We hit it off with them right from the start.  President Porter has a funny sense of humor and teased us that we were both going to gain about 20 lbs. while in New Zealand! We are determined to prove him wrong!!! He thought he might put me in the Mission Office for a month or so, but decided to just go ahead with plan "A" which was to send us to Gisborne to teach and fellowship less active members.  We are called "Member Leadership Support" missionaries.  In other words...proselyting missionaries!! Aaaaahhhhhh!! I hope we can learn fast, because we don't have a clue what we are doing!!

We hit it off with all of the Samoan Elders right from the start! The Elder on the right is writing to Malia Loo from St.George.  When he found out that we were friends with the Loos, we were his best friends!

We are both adjusting to wearing "Church Clothes" every where we go!! Lonne is about to go crazy!

After the leadership training meeting on Thursday, we drove with the Elders in the Hamilton, NZ area down to Hamilton, where we visited the temple grounds, and bought a car.

 New Zealand Temple

 These little kids were waiting for their parents who were inside the temple at a wedding.  The little girl was sooooo cute! We wanted to take them with us!

 This is the view to the side of the temple.  Those are cows in the pasture.  There are TONS of cattle here! We thought we'd see more sheep than cattle....but so far, we've seen more cattle.

 There is a woman who has a stand outside of her home called "Mamma's Donuts" The Elders wanted to stop there on our way out of town. She sells donuts to the people who come to go to the temple.  Well, they were as good as the Elders said they were! Oh my gosh! They were soooooooo good! I'm glad we don't live by Mama's Donuts, or I would be in trouble!!! I am squinting in very picture....the sun was so bright!

 Lonne with his Donut!  We were in the back seat in the car with the Elders.  They took us to our Hotel to and then to buy a car from the Stake President in Hamilton.  He owns a car dealership. We ended up buying a used Nissan Skyline.  It was clean, low miles, and it even had wheels! Yay!

 Here we are with our new car for the next 18 months.  I'm missing my little Lexus right now...this car doesn't have any of the bells and whistles,  but it's going to get us around just fine! We immediately bought a GPS!  Driving on the wrong side of the car and the wrong side of the road is just about enough to stress anyone out...let alone, not knowing where you are going!  So the GPS got us out of town and we checked out of our Hotel, and headed East to the Coast to Gisborne...our new home!

Our new car