In Oct 2012, we took a leisurely stroll through Thun, Switzerland. It’s a very picturesque town on the northern end of Lake Thun (30 minutes south of Bern). It is an old city, and boasts not only some original medieval streets, but also a medieval castle overlooking the city!  I’ll let the photos do the talking: We’re suckers for covered bridges, and Thun had a very beautiful...

If you’re looking for a resource for LDS (Latter-day Saint) Trek prep activities, I have some helps for you! If you’re looking for a script for an activity, here’s one I put together with the help of other resources I found online, and then edited to fit our needs. For our activity, we met on a farm/ranch with the youth, leaders and “ma’s and pa’s”. We invited everyone to come in their trek-wear,...

Since Chinese New Year is just around the corner, I thought it would be appropriate to share our experience with Chinese New Year in Rotorua, New Zealand! Admittedly, New Zealand gets flooded with Asian tourists over the Chinese New Year. We found busloads of Chinese groups everywhere we went, and we sometimes found it humorous to watch what excited them the most. For example, in the evenings we saw buses drop off the busloads at the local...

After leaving Rotorua, we drove to Taupo, which is located centrally on the North Island. Lake Taupo is the largest lake in New Zealand, and the town of Taupo, on its north end, has a population around 24,000 people. It’s known for being a center of volcanic and geothermal activity—but unlike Rotorua (which is stinky), Taupo is not stinky, and is well known known for hot springs! It’s not nearly as...

This summer I had the opportunity to speak at the inaugural Family Adventure Summit, which was held in Penticton, BC (Canada) over Labor Day weekend in 2017. I was asked to speak on “Repatriation”…which is a fancy (albeit ugly) word that means “the return of someone to their own country.” We returned to the US four years ago after a very deliberate 180. We had sworn we’d never live in the US...

After a 3 1/2 hour ferry crossing from the Southern Point of New Zealand’s North Island (Wellington) to the Northern tip of the South Island (Picton), we sought out a fun destination that would reward the kids for good behavior on the ferry, as well as fill some extra time before a long drive to Nelson. Picton is a small town with a population of only 4,000-ish residents, and although it gets a lot of through-traffic, it isn’t...