Quentin's 1st Solo

Quentin soloed!! It was very nice of him to wait until Dayton and I came up for a visit to do it. :)

 The whole family was at the airport to watch.

It's tradition to rip the back off the shirt you're wearing when you solo for the first time and have everyone sign it.  Quentin made sure to put a t-shirt he didn't care about over top of the one he was wearing before we could get to it. :)

Dad had to get the ripping started with his leatherman.

Then Caleb wanted to finish it off.

Dayton had to help him at the end.

Deborah decorated his shirt and everyone signed it after we got home.

Dad is already looking forward to all the shopping trips Quentin can make (and Dad not have to) now that he's soloed.

RC Airplane

The boys built a remote control (RC) airplane. 

Quentin made a tool to cut the Styrofoam with.  It consisted of  a wire with voltage going through it that cut the Styrofoam.

They didn't have enough voltage to make nice cuts, so the plane from scratch is on hold. In the meantime they put one together from a kit.

It turned out great and it flies really nice.

Joshua designed the Night Hawk graphics.

Below Joshua is giving it a toss to get it going.

Anna and Joshua

Joshua

Searching for Plane Wreck Survivors

A J3 Cub lost it's engine on the other side of the mountain behind Nondalton.  Pilots are taught to always stay with the airplane and the rescuers will come, but after two days the pilot and passenger gave up and decided to hike to Nondalton which they knew was only eleven rugged miles over the mountain.  They left a note for the rescuers (who did come) letting them know where they were heading.  It took the search helicopters another couple of days to find them even after they found the wreck and knew exactly where they were heading.  That's how rough the terrain back there is added to the fact they didn't know which route they were planning to take.

 There are trails that go from Nondalton over the mountain and about half way to the area where the plane crashed.  However, all the men of the village that know those trails well were either in Anchorage or had gone moose hunting up the lake.  Paul and Quentin had been back in that area hunting, but not near as far as the plane crash was.  After a couple of days of helicopters searching and the two men hadn't been found, the men who were up the lake moose hunting headed back so they could help search and Quentin and Josh A. decided to head up and behind the mountain on their 4-wheelers as far as they (and Paul) felt comfortable going.  Another fellow in town headed out walking in another direction in case they came around the mountain that way.
     Quentin and Josh went about a third of the way toward the plane before heading back.  They actually got to about the place where the helicopter finally found the men, but the helicopter had found the men about two hours before Josh A. and Quentin left Nondalton.  We didn't hear the news on the radio because the helicopter was so low and on the other side of the mountain.  Quentin and Josh A. left their 4-wheelers and climbed to the top of a ridge to check in with us on their hand-held radio.  We had heard of the rescue by that time and told them to come on back.  The man who had headed north around that side of the mountain also had a radio and heard the call and headed home as well.
     As Quentin and Josh A. turned to walk back down to their 4-wheelers, they were startled to see a mama bear and two cubs running towards them.  We are taught to never run when confronted with a brown bear, but these guys were already running towards them and their 4-wheelers were not very far away, so they took off running for them.  As they ran down the hill Josh A. hollered at Quentin to slow down because he looked like a moose heading down the hill.  He says he was afraid the bears would get excited about chasing a moose, I'm wondering if it didn't have more to do with the shirt Quentin was wearing that day :)  It's the shirt he and Dayton had just bought in Anchorage.

They made it to the 4-wheelers and took off before the bears reached them... Yikes!

Farewell to the Martin's

The Martin's came to house sit for us 3 1/2 years ago when we went to town to have baby Sarah.  They decided to stay and join our fellowship.  It has been a wonderful time of friendship and spiritual growth for both our families.  Now they feel that Yhwh is moving them on to the next step.  They're moving to Wasilla and we will sorely miss them.   Below they are packing up the plane to leave.

 Teri, Gilana, and Kinsey

 One of the most obvious ways we will miss the Martin's is in our worship and fellowship time.  David, their oldest son and a wonderful musician, has been leading our worship.  We have enjoyed the times of worship and are always excited to hear his latest new song.  We have learned so much from him and we are very grateful for the time he spent teaching us to play better.
Before he left we recorded our worship time.  The first song below we learned while we were in Israel.  Lavonne is running the slideshow of words with one of my favorite freeware programs http://www.zionworx.org.uk/

The first clip is from Yariv Goldman's song "Ma Yedidot".  It's in Hebrew.  We've all been studying Hebrew and my favorite way to learn is by learning worship songs.

The second clip is "Be Thou My Vision" by  Dallán Forgaill

Already the kids are stepping up to fill David's shoes.  While Paul and the big kids were gone last week, Anna & Joshua volunteered to lead our worship time and they did a good job.

Going's On's

Well my good intentions of starting to post again haven't lasted long now that we're home.  Everyday things aren't quite as exciting as traveling to Israel:)  But we have done quite a few fun things this month.

Our High School and Jr. High teams played against some of the teachers and adults in town including Mom and Dad.  It was a fun game but they had a little size on us.
First Half - https://vimeo.com/38132335
Second Half - https://vimeo.com/38879503

 On a normal year we can drive our truck across the ice and down to Iliamna but this year we've almost broken the snow fall record in Anchorage and there is too much snow to get past fish camp.  Since we couldn't drive our truck down, we drove snow machines and 4 wheelers across the lake.  Mr. Clark came up from Iliamna to fish camp and picked us and a couple more people from town up with their van and drove us all down to watch Dennis Agajanian.

He is an amazing guitar player who has toured with Johnny Cash and now works with Samaritan's Purse touring around villages. 

 We had family fun night at the community building to raise money for the carnival .

It was a fun night filled with speed scrabble, but no good pictures.

(The boys weren't into scrabble so much.)

 Last week, Dad and the four oldest kids spent most of the week in Anchorage watching state basketball and helping some friends get a cabin ready to live in.  

We were a little crowded in the plane.

Mt. Redoubt steaming.

 Newhalen and Aniak boys both made it again and Newhalen won this time!  Yay, one championship for each of them.  I think they could have easily got first and second again but being as how they don't seed the 1A teams they ended up playing each other first.  That ended up being the best game of the tournament and they easily won the rest of their games but with a loss the first night the best Aniak could do was 4th.

Newhalen and Ft. Yukon captains.

Aniak warming up.
All the yellow warmups are their seniors.  They're going to lose half their team next year!

4th place game.
Aniak rather ran away with this game.  All the non-starters got to play.  Go Andy! Go John! :)

The Newhalen and Aniak girls also made it to state and also played each other first and the Newhalen girls also won the championship!!  It was a big week for Newhalen.  It was a little scary to watch the Newhalen girls.  They had a tendency to get behind in the first quarter then come back and win at the end.  It made for exciting games though:) 

Newhalen vs. Aniak

The Martins are in the process of moving to Wasilla and living in Ms. Regina's cabin.  Ms. Regina only lives there for a couple weeks in the summer so there was a lot of snow to be shoveled and monitor wasn't working so in between games we were up there working getting it ready for them to move. 

There was LOTS of snow.  We're talking record breaking snowfall here and a super long drive way.

Dad working on the monitor.

Plus all that, we've had just normal everyday things doing on.

Hazel and Sarah helping Deborah cook.

Caleb and Hazel doing school.

Dog pile on Dad.

Going fishing in the living room.

We've also had a few birthdays but I'll save those for later. 

The Flight Home

We spent our last couple day in the land at a friends house in Jerusalem.  They left the 24th but had rented the apartment till the end of the month which was when we were leaving.  So it worked out perfect for us to stay there.

We were all still sick so we spent most of the time there resting.

We spent one evening on Ben Yehuda street.

We had our last shwormas.

The last day we were there we had to be out of the apartment by ten in the morning so we spent the afternoon with the Kaspi's.  The dad works at the Wiseman Institute so we got to go up in the particle accelerator.

Most of us were better by the time we got on the plane but Sarah was still sick with a pretty bad cough.  All the little kids that were in the group we were with got it.

Benjamin thought Sarah made a great pillow.

At the airport in Tel Aviv the carts are free, but in Newark they're five dollars apiece!  So we were very loaded down with bags.

On the way to Grandma and Grandpa Rogers we spent the night at our friend the Schaefers.  On the way to their house we drove through Washington D.C.

We couldn't drive the motor home in front of the capitol building but we could see it down every street:)



We saw the back of the Lincoln Memorial...



And drove past the Arlington National Cemetery.  (As we got to Arlington Cemetery, we realized we were at the end of things to easily drive by in Wash. D.C. and we didn't know which way to turn to get to the Schaefer's house (our next stop).  We drove around the round-about about 3 times waiting for the GPS to tell us which way to go:)

I think this is the only picture we have from the Schaefers house.  Sad, we had fun.  We tried to remember all of the dances we learned in Israel around a fire that night.