We just returned from our short tour of several SD and NE churches; we made contact with these churches when we hosted our last team in Tanzania before we headed to the states for our furlough last year.  The team was made up mostly of people from the Assemblies of God churches in Lead SD, Beatrice NE and Valentine NE.  We were in that area from March 2 through March 11.

We saw most of the team members and took part in services in all three churches.  This was our first visit to that area of NE and to SD and we thoroughly enjoyed seeing that part of our nation.  In addition to seeing some friends from the team and meeting some wonderful new people, we came away with some great memories.  We visited some game reserves where we drove through Prairie Dog towns and saw wild buffalo (bison) grazing, drove through the beautiful Black Hills National Forest, visited the famous town of Deadwood SD (where many of the old west heroes lived and died such as Wild Bill Hickok) and was able to visit awesome Mt. Rushmore.

Our trip was cut short when we were trying to get to our last service in Red Cloud NE, pastor Steve Wilson has been a long time friend and the church has supported our ministry for a number of years.  We were driving in blizzard conditions and after waiting for county plows to clear the road for us to continue we were told that the road on ahead would be covered over in numerous places.  We decided we needed to back track a little ways and take the highway south while we still could.

We were able to drive out of the blizzard conditions in about 2 hours and kept making our way south and east towards Kansas City and on towards Springfield.  We were disappointed that we were unable to continue on to Red Cloud but Pastor Steve was very gracious about our need to turn back and head south.

We will cherish the memories of our trip there as well as the friendships that were made there.