We are in Sydney, Nova Scotia - and it is the end of the earth!

 1 June 2022

Hello again.  For all those who thought we must have fallen off the edge of the earth - not quite.  But we're at the end of it.  This is the Sydney end of the Cape Breton Peninsula where we are assigned.  If you look way over the top os Sister Johnson's head, you can see Ireland.  Well, not really, but it's the next landfall.


We arrived in Sydney on May 17.  Excluding a 2-day stop in Montreal, we drove 650 miles a day, every day, for 7 days just to get here.  Our apartment has been vacant since March 2020, when the last senior couple who was here had to leave in a rush due to covid.  The Mission miracle working housing couple, Elder and Sister Roberts, along with a few of the local members got the old furniture out, cleaned, and brought in new furnishings.  As all you who know Sister Johnson will attest, the state of clean and arrangement of furniture didn't meet her standards, and she spent nearly a week sanitizing and rearranging (actually I rearranged it wherever she said to).  Now no germ will dare come within 50 feet of the place, and we have a very little cozy nest where we will live very comfortably for the next 6 months.  

The biggest frustration here has been - no internet - it's shocking how dependent we are on it for most all forms of communication.  We finally got it installed yesterday after a 12-day wait (which we were told was short), and we are now connected to the world again.  So expect to see new posts, photos, and updates regularly.  Our US phones work perfectly here, and we have them in our pockets all the time.  We found out that the local members and friends here are reluctant to call an out-of-country number, and they get charged extra on top of it.  So I got a local Cape Breton phone number, with the hopes of just having it forward to my 801 phone, but I found they also don't trust out-of-area phone numbers.  I hope all phone solicitors and scammers end up at the bottom of the deepest coal pit in Nova Scotia.  Anyway, I now have 2 phones all the time, but that's a minor inconvenience.  My new phone number is:  782-777-7714, but no one in the US needs to use that number, just call or text us in the usual way.

The Province of Nova Scotia runs SW to NE, and we are at the very North end of it.  Cape Breton is a large island connected to the mainland by a short causeway/land bridge.  It's about 75mi wide x 120mi long, and the Sydney branch to which we are assigned covers all of it.  So we and our diesel Touareg will be putting on a lot of miles/kilometers, at the Canadian price of diesel (gag me).  Some of our branch members live 1.5 hours away from Sydney - each way - and they make the trip every week.  We have seen remarkable examples of faithfulness and service just since we arrived.

So we do have some exciting news and photos to share that will be coming to this blog soon.  We love you all!

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