Portals for Discovery: Summer 2012 - Intro and New Mexico! :)

The last week of April, I boarded a bus along with 47 other BYU students and faculty members. We began a month long tour of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. We performed as members of the BYU International Folk dance ensemble. During our travels we stayed with host families in addition to hotels. We were able to go site seeing and have community outreach experiences as well.

Our first two performance cities were Farmington, New Mexico and Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Farmington was great! We had the opportunity to eat dinner with other college age students while we were there. We performed in a beautiful venue too. My friend Amber and I stayed with a fantastic host family for two nights and three days. The Lucas family.

Amber and I both agree we learned so much about love, life, and how to be true disciples of Christ from this family. They let us be a part of their family scripture study. That meant a lot to both of us. It was a very effective study that the whole family participated in. We decided that we would like to strive to have studies like that with our future families.
Low point of NM: I was sick and awake the whole first night we were there. I wasn't able to eat much for the next few days. Dancing on an empty stomach is hard- who would have guessed! ;)

On our way to southern NM we stopped at some ancient Native American ruins. It was interesting to see where they lived and learn what archaeologists believe was their lifestyle.

Alamogordo was very fun. We danced three shows while we were there; two for children in the public school system and one evening performance for the general community. We had a few hours of free time one of our afternoons there. I had a lot of fun exploring the small shops and meeting the locals downtown.

Heidi and I

We went to a space museum.

In front of a propulsion test machine

Before we entered Texas, we made one more stop at White Sands National Park!!!

We took sleds to slide down the sand dunes. In order to gain maximum speed we waxed the bottom of the sleds before hand. We learned that bars of soap do just as good of job as real wax.