Joseph Smith descendants

We have been given the assignment to take genealogy packets to descendants of Joseph and Emma Smith.    One of the Smith granddaughters - Ina Inez Smith - married Sydney Wright from Australia.  They moved to New South Wales and had ten children.  From those ten, there are now over 500 descendants living here in Australia.  We went north to Maroochydore to visit with Dawn Schmith, a descendant and recent convert.  Maroochydore is on the Sunshine Coast and a beautiful beach community.  We had a lovely visit with Dawn and her family and then found a place to stay for the night.

We found a nice little resort in Coolum called the Sea Cove, dropped our stuff, and headed for the beach.

The BEST fish and chips ever!!!  The snapper was super fresh and the batter light and crispy.   Yum!

A whole tree full of cockatoos!

This area has 65 K of uninterrupted white sand beaches.  We set up
the camp chairs and settled in for the afternoon.  It was a georgeous
day!

We bushwalked through Mapleton Falls National Park.

There are several places along Mountain View Road that
gave us a great view to the Glass House Mountains.

This is the little annual plant that
Heather likes to plant in her front
yard.  Here it is a six foot bush!

 We took the interior track through the Hinterlands - through such lovely towns as Mapleton, Montville, and Maleny.  They run along a ridge that has a view all the way to the ocean in places.

Passover/Easter

Nevel and Hazel Hillier invited us, along with the Langelands, to share Passover with their family. Hazel is a Jewish convert and an excellent cook, both of which made the evening delightful. Understanding the symbols and traditions of the Passover brings light to the last supper and the sacrament.

The Uniting Church on Albert Street holds a "Messiah" sing in the Sunday before Easter. We went with

Alan and Helen Tibbets to the rehearsal and performance with

soloists and a fabulous conductor.

It has been fun to try some new fruits to go with all the new adventures. This is a dragon

fruit. It was crunchy but without much flavor. It would be fun to serve in a fruit salad because

of the fun color.

This is a custard apple. It tastes

like custard, but looks nothing like an apple. The trees flower, but not all the blossoms turn into fruit.

This is probably why they are so

expensive - $6.

Noosa Heads

Never let it be said that we give up easily. After four weeks of rainy P-days, we finally got a beautiful sunny day. We headed back to Noosa to finish the walk that ended in the monsoon. The walk along the cliffs is 5.4 K and takes about two hours round trip. We saw some beautiful things along the way including this flower that looks like a tiny poinsettia, but the red is part of the green leaf.


The trail ends at "Hell's Gate". The view is spectacular, but the beach is dangerous with some killer waves. When you look down from the point, the surf is all rocks and

foam.

We then drove down to Caloundra and our favorite Shelly Beach. We broke out the camp chairs and watched the waves roll in. As the sun got lower in the west, the wind came to blow the sea foam balls along the sand.

It was a perfectly BEAUTIFUL day!

road trip

The Abel's are on their last transfer and are doing some things on their bucket list. They invited us to go with them up to Bundaberg to the Mon Repos Conservation Park to watch the turtles hatch. It is about a five hour drive through beautiful country. We passed massive fields of sugar cane. We had a pit stop in Childers where we found this fun sign for a dentist's office.

The loggerhead turtles come on shore in November and December to lay their eggs. Some six to eight weeks later the eggs begin to hatch. The sex of the baby turtles is determined by the temperature of their nests. The golden sands of Mon Repos are a bit warmer and produce mostly females, while the white coral sands of the Lady Elliot islands produce mostly males. Only one in one thousand turtles survive to maturity and the females born at Mon Repos return some thirty years after birth to lay eggs and start the cycle again.

The baby turtles break the surface of the nest at night. This keeps them out of the hot sun and away from hungry birds. As they come out of the sand, they follow the moon light on the breaking waves to the ocean. This particular Monday night (Feb.20. 2012) was moonless, and those in the group with torches (flashlights) got to light a path from the nest to the ocean. The walk from the nest to the water will set their internal gps so they will come back to the beach where they were born in thirty years to lay their eggs.

The next morning, we stopped at Noosa Heads

to take a lovely nature walk along the ocean

cliffs. The day was a little overcast, but we

started up the trail anyway. We saw the Boiling

Pot and some lovely beaches before a huge storm

hit.

We turned around and headed for a PC we had passed on the trail. The wind was so strong that we huddled in the cubicle for a while. After

about 45 minutes, we realized we couldn't possibly be any wetter so we just headed for the car. It was a grand adventure!

The Boys

Scott and Antonio came after Christmas. President gave us the week off to explore and explore we did. First we went to the sky walk at Tamborine Mountain. It is steel supported bridges through trees as tall as sky scrapers.

The next day we went to Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary where they were able to get up close

and personal with a koala.

Thanks to Scott's techno-savy, my phone now sounds like a kookaburra.

The tassies were pretty creepy.

2012 came in with a bang - fireworks

on the river.

We enjoyed the botanical gardens at Tambroine, but the ones at Mt. Coot-tha were even better.

The next journey was to the Glass House Mountains. We saw our first kangaroo in the wild at the overlook.

The week ended at Shelly Beach on the Sunshine coast. At first I thought the name was wrong because there weren't many shell. But as we looked closer, there were many beautiful little shells. The volcanic rocks were interesting with their strange patterns.

Thanks guys for a wonderful week!

Missionary Christmas

Early in December, we had a "celebrity" elder join the Brisbane Mission. Elder Will Hopoate is a rugby player and has left his professional team to be a full time missionary. He is a humble young man and will be a great missionary.

The temple was a special place at Christmas. There was a beautiful nativity out front. The elders came caroling one evening.

We had a very small tree in our flat that the

Abeles were kind enough to give us.

Christmas Eve was spent at the Karawatha Chapel with 133 missionaries. Each district did a talent and cheer. The Abeles read a missionary Dr. Seuss. We decorated a tree and had lunch. Then we watched "The Best Two Years". They all left with armloads of boxes from home and homemade Christmas cookies.

Christmas Down Under

In late November the poinciana trees start to
bloom. Their green leaves and red blossoms signal to Australians that Christmas is coming.

In the English tradition, the Brisbane Stake put on a Christmas Pantomime. The story line was Al and the Genie - with our Manly elders as the shepherds in the nativity.

The week before Christmas there was a parade down Queen's Street every night. Mary and Joseph were followed by the three Wise Men, the Night Before Christmas and Santa. The big (fake) tree is in St. George Square.