Last night I did manage to spend some time posting pictures on the blog. It is not so much posting them that causes me to fall behind, it is the editing that takes the most time. I have found that when I down load a batch to the computer, if I do not almost immediately put captions on each of them I never get around to doing. It seems that the desire to caption pictures geometrically gets less with the passing of time. Anyway I put on a couple of dozen pictures and will try to keep it up in the future – he says for the 100^th time.

Slept well but woke much too early. Spent part of the morning tidying up the house and then packing for our three days in Durban – well actually 48 hours spread over 3 days. We are getting good at packing for this trip because we take it at least once every 6 weeks for zone conferences. We will follow the Bartholomews and hopefully be able to mark our way so we can someday do it by ourselves. Durban is a major city with lots of interesting areas and streets. We have been told that our GPS will get us where we need to go but not always the best way.

The garage door installer just left – the problem is such that he can not just fix it here so he will have to take it in to be repaired. Since we are going to be gone for 3 days he made an appointment to come back on Friday.

We locked up the house at about 10:15 and headed to Esikhawini where we met the Barts at Nkule’s house – she is the young lady who is leaving for a mission in Uganda (not Ghana) – where we put her bags in the car, took last pictures, and were off for Durban.

We stopped on the way for lunch and arrived at the mission home at about 2:30. We spent some time talking to the elders and then the Manns before once more loading up and going to our B&B. Unfortunately Little Haven, our favorite B&B, was filled up with other  couples coming in for All Zone Conference. However Vic and Grace found us a very nice B&B just a short ways away.

There were three other couples who arrived yesterday staying there. The Klingers and Knudsens who are serving in New Castle, and the Wells who are serving in the area office as mental health missionaries. We knew the Klingers but the Knudsens just arrived about 3 weeks ago and this was the first time the Wells had been to our mission since we got here.

Our room was nice and big with a King size bed. The only drawback was that there were no big soft chairs to lounge in, but there was a common room that had OK chairs. Durban was a little cooler than RB was so it was nice that the air-conditioner was also a heating unit.

In the evening we all went out as a group to a restaurant named Roma’s which was on the 32 floor of a building and revolved completely around about every hour. The scenery was spectacular at time, the décor was OK, the company excellent, and the food – once it came – was delicious. The problem was that it took 2 hours to get our food. When elder Greismer talked to the maitre de he was told that 5 of the chefs did not show up for work and so the kitchen was just over loaded. We could understand the problem but once we ran out of things to chat about, that did not make the wait any less annoying.

Thanks to our dear GPS we arrived back at the B&B with only a little trouble. Others got in a loop that we managed to avoid and had somewhat of a trial getting back.

The best part of the day was talking to the other couples about their areas and what they were doing.