Back in San Diego for a Wedding!

We left our Mission at Mutual Dell a week early to get back to San Diego for Danielle and Nick's wedding on October 4th.  We arrived at Santee Lakes on September 25th and will be here for one month.  Our Mission at Mutual Dell was wonderful.  It is a very beautiful camp.  Each day was truly a gift from God.  The only thing that was hard to get used to was not having any phone service what so ever.  We did not get Internet until late August, and that was very limited.  Mutual Dell is located in the American Fork Canyon at about 6400 feet elevation.  The only thing that works is satellite. Because the canyon is very steep and narrow, even satellite is very limited.  We have very limited Internet.  Remember dial up service.  Well, I think I remember dial up being a bit faster than what we had.  It was impossible to keep up the blog.  We just couldn't spend the time it took to upload pictures.  I used to think the internet at Santee Lakes was a bit slow, but it seems like blazing fast to me right now compared to what I have been used to.

This is a picture of our lodge.  Turns out that when it was rebuilt back in the early 70's, they somehow used  the specs from Provo instead of American fork.  The snow levels for American Fork are substantially more then Provo.  The Church hired an engineer to check out the lodge.  Turns out that there are major structural damage to the inter roof.  The decision was made to release the Stewart's (The year round Missionaries.) and close the camp for the winter (Oct 1st through the end of April.  This all came as a shock to all of us.  This has never been done before.  The Stewart's were given until October 1st to move out of the cabin (Along with all of their belongings that they had moved in from their house in Banding Utah.)  We all tried to help them where ever we could.  In their rush to move, they had a motor home that they used last year during the summer before they officially took over in January.  They had it stored in front of the cabin for since then.  They decided to move it to a consignment shop to try to sell it.  In his rush to get it there, while driving out of the steep winding roads of the canyon, he crashed the motor home into a tree totaling it.  There are lots of bikers in the canyon and they take their share out of the road.  A bike was coming up the canyon and a car coming up as well moved over to avoid the bike but caused Elder Stewart to swerve to the right.  He dropped off the road,causing him to loose control, hit a large tree and continued another 50 feet hitting another very large tree.  Here is  some pictures of the motor home.

Here's a picture of the motor home parked in front of the Stewart's cabin where it sat for 9 months.

These pictures are at the consignment lot where it drove it to.

It is a wonder how he did not even get a scratch on himself.  I have no doubt that if anyone else was riding in the passenger side that they would have been killed.  Another amazing part was that he drove the motor home like this another 10 miles to the consignment shop.  He traveled through the town of American Fork without any problems.  I am sure he got a lot of weird looks from people on the road, but he make it.  The sad thing is that because it sat for the last nine months, they did not have insurance on it. 

Back to a happier note, we will be in San Diego for a month.  We will then travel east to Arizona and spend some time with our Grand Kids and family.