Fletcher Madsen formerly in Africa

Oi pessoal!  It feels like I've already been in the Valley for so long, but it's only been a week. If you know me, you know I forget stuff pretty easily, the transfer down to the Valley was pretty stressful. I left a bag, so we had to drive an hour back to castle rock to get it, but hey, that means I can say I drove through nearly the entire mission all at once! The drive was really pretty, lots of mountains, snow, and open space, the only thing similar to Castle Rock was good views of the mountains.  Even though this area is called the Valley (rightfully so, we're in between mountains) it's actually super high up, about 7,600 feet of elevation. Thankfully I was already in a high elevation area but running is still a bit of a struggle. Our church building has one of the only full-size wooden basketball courts in the entire valley (lots of courts are carpet for some reason), so we've been able to play quite a bit. Our area is almost all members of our church, which i...

Oi gente!  Sorry it's been so long, a loooot has happened. Christmas is an interesting time to be a missionary. Thankfully we were able to call our families, so that was super fun, but it definitely felt different. I got some pretty sweet gifts, Elder Thompsons family spoiled me, so we joked a lot that they got me more presents than my own family as I had told my family not to get me much as they had been spoiling me over the past months. It's crazy how much more you appreciate socks as presents the older you get. Maybe it's just a missionary thing, but I love my cool looking socks. With the holidays, not too many people want to be contacted, but we were still able to teach a few new people. A few girls on Facebook thought Elder Thompson was cute, so that was pretty funny, although we didn't end up teaching them much, sorry girls, we're unavailable as long as we're wearing our tags haha.  I also had my 21st birthday last week, which was surreal. In terms of ...