Day 1 - Arrival at Missionary Training Center

 Day 1: Well we made it to the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, Utah.  We arose at 6:00am thinking we had plenty of time to leave by 9:00 am, but barely made our departure deadline. Our son in law Taylor made us some pancakes and Shawn stopped over to say goodbye so we cherished the last moments together. The night before we left, we had all our kids, their spouses and children over. We played some games and enjoyed each other, so we didn’t get to bed until late. Early Monday morning when we were packing we noticed that our little granddaughter MYA was hiding in our suitcase and wanted to go to Russia. Of course we were willing to oblige, but our daughter Krista wouldn’t let us take her. J  

Our First day in the MTC was administrative in nature to ensure we had all our vaccinations, travel, visas and schedule for the week. We were honored to have the MTC president and his counsellors talk to our group. There are about 30 senior missionary couples in our training session and they are going all over the world. There were about 8 couples who are serving medical missions, 4 couples serving in various visitor centers and the rest of us were humanitarian or proselyting couples.  It was a very spiritual day and fun to get to know all the other couples. We were definitely the youngest couple with most retired. Needless to say we were exhausted at the end of the day, but we finished our studies and homework,  set our alarm for 4:50 am to get up and exercise, kissed each other and went to bed as missionaries of the lord.