Vacations

As I've mentioned in several blogs, my husband Mike recently retired after 36 years with civil service.

He worked at IRS in Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City, and then served most of his years in civil service at Hill Air Force Base, in Utah. He also retired with 24 of years of service with the Army National Guard. We are enjoying retirement and are planning several vacations.

The first will be to Hawaii in May 2007. My cousin lives there and has invited us to stay with him and his wife. We are excited to see them and plan to stay with them for a couple of days. We don't want to impose for an extended stay though, and also want to be on our own.

We plan to stay at the Hale Koa, a military hotel for another few days.

I've been to Hawaii twice, 1976 and 1978. This will be Mike's first trip there. We are also interested in staying at some of the other islands. Possibly Kauai, and Maui.

There are many luxurious beach front condos and homes offered for rent directly by the owners.

We have a second vacation planned in September to visit the church history sites in Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Nauvoo, and New York, and a few other New England states, like Maine, and Vermont.

We're hopeful that we will be touring Europe in 2008. Most of our stay will be in England.

This will be my first trip to Europe and I am very excited. Mike served a two year LDS mission there, and we both have ancestors from surrounding cities in that area.

My niece Robyn put our grandfather's name in quotations in a search engine, and much to our surprise his name and picture appeared.

Family members who still live in that area have created a website connecting him to their genealogy. Thanks to e-mail I've struck up a friendship with one of my grandfather's descendants.

Don't ask me to give you the relationship, it would hurt my brain to figure it out. We plan to visit him and his wife, who is really the relation.

We are trilled to make this connection, and trilled for the opportunity to go there!