What I forgot...

Last night as I was typing my post I was really tired, and toward the end a few things slipped my mind.  (Imagine that)  

While in Panama City we also visited the Miraflores Locks and the LDS temple.  They were both wonderful in very different ways.

We went to the locks first, since they were pre-programmed into our GPS.  A ship was passing through, and it was Huge!  There were thousands of boxes on board, and each one was the size of a semi truck trailer.  Actually, "thousands" is probably an underestimate.  I would love to have known what they were all carrying.  We watched the lock be drained of water to lower the ship, and then watched the ship move out of the lock into the open canal.  Even before the ship was all the way out, the lock began filling again for another ship.  It was quite cool.

As we were leaving the locks, Mike asked a gate guard (in Spanish) if he knew where the LDS temple was.  He beamed at us and said in perfect English, "You're from Salt Lake City!"  We told him we were actually from Virginia, and I asked where he was from.  He said, "Panama."  When I asked how he'd learned English he said, "From talking to people!"  He told us the temple was just down the street and around the corner.  (We knew it was close.)

The temple was amazing.  It's beautiful, of course, but the feeling was so... peaceful, wonderful, calm, and in many ways very different from the other places we had been.  We took pictures that night, and Mike talked to a man from Venezuela who is thinking of moving his family to Panama because he is concerned that Venezuela is moving quickly toward communism.  The kids all exclaimed, in quiet voices, how wonderful it was to be there.

We returned the following morning-- minus Peter, Naomi and Grandma-- to do baptisms for the dead.  We joined a Panamanian ward from Colon, and everything was done in Spanish.  The Panamanian kids were beautiful.  Some were clearly native Kuna indian, and some were black, and some were Hispanic, but they all were smiling and reverent and although we could not communicate very well, they made us feel very welcome.  

Ok, I'm off to read stories to my kids.

Good night!  =)