Today was our P-day, so we went and bought bikes to ride around the city of Las Palmas.

Here we are at the Playa Canteras which is a beautiful beach in Las Palmas.  It was a very cloudy day so nobody was on the beach.  There is a bike path that goes along the harbor and through different parts of the city.  The harbor is so beautiful!  Parking is a huge problem in Las Palmas, so our bikes will come in handy when we need to get to different parts of the city.

After our bike ride we met up with the Sisters and Elders that are on our island and we hiked up to these caves.  They were pretty cool!

Here we are by the caves with the ancient ruins just above the city of Telde.  The blue in the distance is the ocean.  A lot of this part of the island is desert.

We took pictures of the Sisters and Elders jumping up all at once and it turned out really well.  Here we tried to capture us in the air but it didn't quite work with my camera.  We are caught in this picture just starting to jump, but Elder Buhler  was "scrunching" while he jumped.  One Elder did capture us in the air with his camera and Elder Buhler looked like a "scrunching ballerina"!

Elder Buhler said that this cave was perfect for us to live in because it was the perfect height for us.  I guess the people who lived here a long time a go were a lot smaller than we are!

We love our young adults!!  We had an activity at our house yesterday  where we had so much fun!!!  Here we are just before we taught them how to play kickball!!  They were quite good at it!!  We are at a local park just a few blocks from our house.

Elder Buhler is trying to win in wii dance!
How do you think he did?

Elder Buhler is at it again just dancing the night away!!  He is moves are so fast that he is a blurr!

Elder Buhler, the BBQ man!!  He was in heaven BBQing at our activity!!

Here I am with all the girls!!  (Sorry Luram that you got stuck in our "girls" photo!)

Making me "guapa" by making my hair straight!!

These are the results!  Pretty amazing! 

Elder Buhler after our kickball game.  Our ball didn't do very well as it basically went flat about half way through our game.  He is also holding our "bases"(it was the best we could do!)  

This is on the main road about a block from our house.  Elder Buhler and I walk this road up and down the mountain every morning.  We have had a few close calls with cars, trucks and guaguas (this is what they call buses here on the island) that have almost hit us!!  

Here is Elder Buhler emailing Katie.   Notice the family picture that is at the end of our bed, yes, we miss you all!!!

We are leaving you with a departing shot of of the view behind Elder Buhler.  Isn't it beautiful here?

We went to Maspalomas for our P-day, which is the south end of the island.  This is where most of the tourist vacation.  Anybody for boogey -boarding?  There are some parts of the beach that have some good waves.  The best waves are in the north end of the island right by Las Palmas where we live.

.  Here is the boardwalk  overlooking the beaches.  

Just showing you what paradise looks like!  Pretty good eh?

This is a view from the boardwalk looking down at the beach  at  Playa de Ingles .

This is the beginning of the sand dunes in Maspalomas.  This is taken from the beach.  Yes, you can ride a camel across the sand dunes.

Can you see the parasail?  You can go up one, two or three at a time.  It was fun to watch!

Another view of one of the beaches.  You can rent a nice chaise-lounge to catch some rays on!

Here is another view of La Playa Ingles.
Obviously we are enjoying our "winter weather" here!  

Happy Valentine's Day!!

We went out to an Italian restaurant not to far from the JAS center for dinner on Valentine's Day.  We randomly picked a restaurant and it was fantastic!!  We enjoyed sitting out on the street and ate dinner.  We hope that all of you had a wonderful Valentine's Day!!

This is what is hanging up at the JAS center!  We love all of the wonderful young adults!!  They are the best!!  We have waited a long time to finally be here and it was all worth it!!

Here are a few pics of some of the young adults at Institute class on last friday night.  We are at the JAS center.

They make life so much fun!!

We love them all so much!!

Filling out their JAS info sheet.

Reed always being so helpful!! (hahahaha!)

This is the gothic cathedral in the Pueblo of Acursa which is in the north end of the Island.  We were visiting young adults in this area with the Sister Missionaries.  The pueblo was so beautiful!!

This is in front of the Cathedral looking out over the mountains from Acursa.  We bought bread and really good chocolate filled goodies!

This is the view from one of our young adults house.  We had to drive up a very steep hill to get there.  She walks up and down this very steep hill everyday!!  I am so impressed!!  You can see the ocean off in the distance.  It is so blue in real life!

This is in the pueblo of Guia and if you look close, you can see that there are caves that people live in.  (I am sorry that I am all of a sudden typing in italics, but I don't know why it is doing this and can't fix it)  The pueblos were all so beautiful!!  We drove through many beautiful and small streets!

Welcome to Carnaval!!  It is huge here!!  It has been going on basically the whole time that we have been here!  This weekend is the last weekend and it seems to get even bigger!!  A lot of people dress up and go to the nightly festivities!  We see them on the street but haven't really been to affected because we stay away from the Carnaval areas.

More of Carnaval pictures!!

Mission Tour/Zone Conference with Elder Caron

Today we had a mission tour/zone conference with Elder Caron.  He is a member of the first quorum of the Seventy and is the first counselor in the Area Presidency of Europe.  He is from England and it was an awesome day learning from him!  Here is a picture of our zone (from our island and from Tenerife), President and Sister Jackson (they came from Madrid), Elder Caron (he is in the middle and to the right of me) and our 2 AP's (from Madrid).  We had our conference in the Las Palmas Chapel.  We fed 20 people breakfast.lunch and dinner and 10 missionaries spent the night at our house last night!!  It was so much fun having them all at our house!!

This is Elder and Sister Aultman from the island of Tenerife.  They are also in charge of a JAS center on their island.  They were so much fun to talk to and they were a big help in feeding all of the missionaries!!  We are here with the Sisters here on our island.  They are awesome and such hard workers!!

Here are two Elders playing fusball in our JAS center.   We had just fed all of the missionaries for dinner and they came with us to meet up with all of the rest of the missionaries to go out tracking for the night.  This was the night before the zone conference so Las Palmas had a lot of Elders out tracking on "fat tuesday"!

This poor Elder didn't know his picture was being taken, but I wanted to show you more of the inside of the JAS center.  Right now we only have internet at the JAS center, so Elder Buhler is checking his emails on his ipad.

Our life here in Gran Canaria is beautiful and eventful.  We thought that we would show you a few pictures of where we go everyday and where we live.


Here Reed is at our favorite fruit store!  It is just around the corner from the JAS center.  It has the biggest strawberries that you have ever seen!!  We shop here almost everyday!

This is what the street looks like that the fruit store is on.  It is one of the main streets through Las Palmas.  Our JAS center is just on the other side of those buildings on the next street.

This is our house that we live in!!  It is the old Canary Island Mission Home.  It sits on top of a big hill and over looks the valley of Santa Brigida.

This is our living room on the main floor.  As you can see, we have plenty of room for visitors!!

This is the view from our kitchen window.  As you can see, we are in the mountains of Gran Canaria.

This is our kitchen.  It is pretty big and nice!  It only took us 1/2 hour to figure out how to turn the ovens on!!  They are not like the ovens in the USA.  We are also trying to figure out celsius tempts. and what they would be in farenheit.

This is our pantry.  It is pretty nice to have such a big one.  It is to the right of the kitchen.

Best part of the house - 2 dryers!!!  this is right next to the pantry!

This is our bedroom and yes, we like it!!  We have a nice balcony through those glass doors.  Yes, that is also a flat screen TV that the Eynons (the senior couple that we replaced) left for us!  They have set us up pretty well!!  To bad we don't have cable yet!!

This is the view that we wake up to every morning!  This is looking through the glass doors in our bedroom.  Not bad eh?

This is our bathroom.  The shower is great but it takes about 5 minutes to get hot water, but once it comes, life is good!!

Our house is three stories.  This is the staircase from the main floor (living room, kitchen, etc.).  You enter on the 3rd floor and you can see the other staircase that goes down to the 1st floor where our bedroom is.  This house has 4 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, den, 2 offices, dining room and breakfast nook.  Also a basketball court and a back yard.  Plenty of room for any visitors!!

If you wonder how we get around, here is our car.  It is a Corsa (we think it is Italian?)  It has a whopping 3 cylinders!!  It humms when it hits 80 kilometers, not the type of humming that a ferrari does, but more like a go-kart!!  We can't complain, it gets us around the island!

We discovered that we have a "lightening bolt" on the back of our car and on the steering wheel, so how can you go wrong with a lightening bolt on your car?  At least we look fast!