Guam & Japan

Here are a few pictures from our trip so far! We stayed our first night at the Hilton Guam Resort and Spa and this is a view from our balcony!

We had reservations at Roy's, which was located in our hotel! We had amazing food and drinks.....Thanks Beth Freisen for the recommendation about the Roy's Martini with special pineapple.  It was amazing, especially with the Macadamia Nut Hamachi.

After dinner we found this nice little spot to take in the view!

Bright and early this morning....good thing we were in first class and that drink is a Mimosa!

We had an 8 hour layover in Narita, Japan so we decided to have multiple meals, tour the city including the local temple, and even got a massage! Not as good as my mother's, but felt very great after a few long flights!

We found this quaint waterfall in the park area outside the temple. 

Well, our plane to New Zealand boards in 20 minutes so that is all we have for now. We are not sure how much internet opportunities we will have in NZ, but we will try to keep our blog updated. 

October

Some fun things we have been doing in the last few weeks:

There were some activities on the island that I was able to get on camera!  Three "vehicles" streamed in at one time and it was pretty interesting to see!

This is one of the new teachers, Alex, and this picture is from his birthday.

Crab.

We rented a golf cart the other day and trekked around the island taking pictures.  Here is one of us on the end of the island!

Here is Mindi getting some rays!

Jason looking over the reef.

Just a few fun pictures to put up here!  Hope that everyone is doing well back home and enjoying fall!

In the Swing of Things

Hello!    Here are a few fun pictures from the last week.  Not much to add, but hope everyone is doing well.

Mindi and Matt on a walk

Looking out the South Point of the island

Manta Ray down at the bottom and Matt swimming towards it

Matt did a dive down to a shipwreck in the lagoon and this is a picture from that dive

Here is a picture of an underwater cave that Matt found on a dive and swam through.  The sides were covered in urchins and the surge was pushing up and down through it.  

Back on Kwaj

 We have arrived back on Kwaj and are into the swing of things with school and everything again.  We finally got our voice message changed to quit saying we are off island!  Our bikes are a bit rustier, but everything is as we remembered.  

It was a pretty quick turn around from the time we got off the plane until school started.  We arrived on a Saturday and reported for work on Tuesday.  We were still a bit tired, but every year the jet lag is less.  It also helps that the flight from Hawaii has been pushed back a few hours to sleep in a bit more in Honolulu.  

When we got back to our rooms, the Huwe's had a made a welcome home sign for us, which was very nice.  The football helmet on the left was my favorite part!

Here is a sunset from the 2nd night back, which I always likes to post.  The weather has been so calm that the lagoon and ocean are like glass in the evenings and mornings.  Compared to the wind that exists all spring, this is very nice.  It is especially quiet with no wind, too.

We took a boat out and you can see just how calm it was out there, even a mile off the atoll.  We found ourselves in a pod of about 100 dolphins and they were jumping and flying all around us!  They were just hanging around the boat so we even stopped and jumped into the deep blue and swam with them!  We heard them talking underwater and they were swimming around us, about 50 feet off!  It was one of the coolest things we had seen.  The next several pictures are of the dolphins that we were with!

This picture shows the set up we had to watch the football game when the huskers played.  Fortunately the kick-off was at noon for us, so we didn't have to get up early or anything!  This was a fun set up.

Other news: we have booked our vacation to New Zealand over Christmas break and are very excited for that! 

We welcomed the new pastor and his family to the island this week as well and we are certainly very excited for his ministry and what he will bring!  A lot of prayers went into their arrival and it was great to meet them.

The Youth Fellowship starts up tonight, so keep that in your prayers as we hope to have a great kickoff!

Not much else to say, just teaching and teaching and doing grad work and everything else.  We miss everyone and hope that things are going well!

Easter

This blog is long overdue, as is the next one about Ryan and Anna's trip out here.  This post is about Easter and our fun time having Easter dinner with friends.  Mindi put together a great Easter dinner for a group of 12 people and had the table set up really nice with dyed eggs with our names on them!  Here are a few pictures from our Easter dinner!

Ryan and Anna Visiting

Over our spring break we had visitors!  Ryan and Anna Gerber came out to Kwajalein and we spent the week snorkeling, sun tanning, boating and flying all over the atoll!  It was a great time and the following pictures offer many of the highlights from the trip!

Here are Anna and Ryan snorkeling over the drop off Oceanside.  You can sort of see the way the atoll drops from 40 feet to thousands of feet in an instant beneath them.  It was really neat to swim over the drop off as there is nothing but empty blue beneath you.  

Here is Ryan with a brittle star we found on Bigi.  They are weird little creatures and cool to find.

We were able to go out deep sea fishing one day and we had perfect weather and a great time!  No one got sea sick and we even caught a couple of fish.  The waves were pretty big at different times, but we sure enjoyed it!  This had to be one of the highlights of our time!

Here are the 2 fish that we caught.  The one on the left is an Ono and it provided a lot of fish steaks, which we definitely enjoyed!  It was awesome to catch the fish ourselves and then cook it up and eat it just a few hour later!  The fish on the right is a Mahi Mahi and it made for some excellent fish tacos.  We were just thankful to catch something and it sure was fun!

Here is a picture of us from sunrise service on Easter morning.  It was a really neat service and fun to see people get baptized in the lagoon.  Ryan and Anna were up every morning before the sunset anyways, with the time change, so this was great!

Here are Mindi and Anna on the front of the boat up at Bigi!  This was one of the most fun things as well as we had a fun time snorkeling, sun bathing and trying not to get burned, or burned worse in case one of us forgot sunscreen on their feet!

This was during the tour the first day and is the highest point in all of the Marshall Islands, even though it is a manmade hill.  It gave us a good view of the island and the atoll.

Here we are relaxing at the snake pit during the first evening.  It was awesome catching up and relaxing as 20 feet in front of us was the ocean!

We were able to fly up to Roi for the day one day and here is us on the beach.  No one in sight!!  We ate at the only restaurant and enjoyed some great time in the sun before flying back to Kwaj.  

Here is Ryan and Anna on Roi looking down one of the cool roads lined by palm trees

We had dinner on the beach several evenings, and the sunset on this particular night was really awesome, so we got pictures in front of it.

Here is Ryan and Anna in front of the sunset.

We had a truly awesome time with them!

Summer isn't to far away and we are very excited to see everyone when we return to Lincoln soon!

Irish Coffee Shop

This week we had our big event for National Honor Society, which is a fundraiser called Coffee Shop.  We set up the Multipurpose room and had several hundred people come through the door as we served them various coffee drinks and had live entertainment.  The event took a lot of planning and work to pull off, but it was a huge success.  The kids did a great job and we enjoyed the evening.  

Here are some pictures from the event below.

The coffee shop was on St. Patrick's day, so that provided us with the theme for our evening.  We all sported our green NHS shirts throughout the night!

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day Mindi made some green clover pancakes and green omelettes.  Here are a few pictures below of her amazing creations!  They were very delicious.  The pictures of the omelettes didn't turn out, but they were great!

We look forward with a ton of anticipation to Spring Break when Ryan and Anna will be out visiting!  We can't wait and hope that everyone is doing well who is reading this!

YF

Hello!  Here are few updates from the last several weeks.

For Mindi's birthday many of her students decided to decorate her marker board with birthday wishes!  This was really neat and a lot of fun

 

 Here are a few picture from Youth Fellowship.  On Monday evenings we lead the youth group here on Kwajalein and are currently enjoying going through the book of Luke.  We start out with a fun game, like charades or pictionary or karaoke, and then we watch a video talk and break into groups for discussion.

Here is another picture from Youth Group.

Right now life is pretty hectic as we get ready for our large fundraiser for National Honor Society!  Hope everything is going well for everyone reading this.

Mindi's Birthday

Last week was Mindi's Birthday and so to celebrate we went on a sunset sailboat cruise!  It was a lot fun for sure!  Mindi was actually sick on Valentines Day and her birthday, but we made the best of it.  Matt had a philipino meal catered on valentine's day and we watched a few great movies. On Mindi's actual birthday we had Kwaj's finest dining and had some friends over in the evening. Overall it was a really good week! Here are some pictures showing the sunset sail.

Here we are getting ready to head out

The sunset was really nice that evening and here is another picture of us just after the sun has set!

Here is Mindi on the boat out on the lagoon!  The wind was really blowing that evening and it was a very, very pleasant sail.

Here is a picture looking down the boat right after we started out.

One other thing of note from the last few weeks was this friendly sea creature stinging Matt's leg!  It was pretty uncomfortable for several hours, but not to bad.

In other news, we have purchased our plane tickets home for the summer and will be getting back to the states on June 10th!