Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Where Does The Time Go?

A few weeks ago Alicia and I flew in a little 14-passenger plane east over to American Samoa, a distance of about 80 miles.

Not a bad little plane
We departed Upolu Island, Samoa, on a Wednesday at 12:00 noon; we arrived at the Pago Pago International Airport on Tutuila Island, American Samoa, on Tuesday at 11:30 a.m.  Go figure.

Some passengers were a little leery of the adventure.
No, seriously, go figure. We flew east across the International Date Line and arrived a half an hour – I mean 24 and ½ hours – before we left. Look, if you fly east from, say, Kansas City to Washington, D.C., you lose an hour. But if you fly east from Apia, Samoa, to Pago Pago, American Samoa, you gain an hour. Or rather, you gain 25 hours. Go figure.

Passengers are each weighed and then seated so as to balance the weight.
Coming back to Upolu Island, of course, we lost a day.  We left Pago Pago, American Samoa, on Thursday for the half-hour flight back to Apia, Upolu Island, Samoa, and arrived on Friday.  It reminded me of the Kingston Trio song, “To Morrow.”


It was great to be back in American Samoa.


I had served there for about a year more than 50 years ago.  It has changed a lot – more cars, more houses, more large shipping vessels in one of the most perfect and beautiful, natural harbors in the world. But the people are still pretty much the same, the mountains and palm trees and crashing waves are the same.

One funny thing we saw on Tutuila was this tree full of bats.  Those dark images in the tree are bats.  They open their wings and flap them to cool off.

Bats!
While in American Samoa, we took a small boat over to the Island of Aunu’u.



The history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Samoa begins on Aunu’u. Very few people live there now, but we do have a thriving branch of the Church on Aunu'u,


and a set of excellent missionaries.

Few missionaries ever get to serve on Aunu'u, or to even visit it.
We never get tired of riding out over the water.  This video can be viewed by going to the blog page itself.



This past week we took another trip to Pago Pago, only this time we went by boat, the Lady Naomi.

The Lady Naomi carries cargo and passengers.
We had some bulky materials we wanted to personally handle, and we wanted to see how well we could both handle a long trip across water.  There is more background to this story, but we will include it in a future post.

This trip to Tutuila Island was a 9-hour trip over moderate to rough seas. Alicia took a good dose of Meclazine before embarking, but it wore off after about 6 hours.  Yes, she was seasick, and had she had the strength to do so, she would no doubt have given me a black eye for talking her into the trip.  But then she took another dose, and soon all was good.

It helped that we stayed that night in The Tradewinds hotel, the nicest on the island.  We were pleased to find a few good books to read in the room.



Needless to say, we took the plane back to Upolu.




2 comments:

  1. Somehow you didn't upload the video, but just a snapshot of the video.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for the wonderful update and beautiful pictures!

    ReplyDelete