Week 43: Rockwood, TN

September 25, 2023

So we made a split second decision to go up to Sevierville in Lanoir city today. Sevierville is one of the hottest tourist spots in all of Tennesee because it's right next to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. So it was about an hour drive, but we went to Bass Pro in Sevierville, which was like a Cabelas on steroids. I bought a sick hat for $10. After that we went to a Wrangler outlet for good old Tubbs, but I actually dropped bands on some nice pants, so it was worth it. We went to this sweet Cherokee Indian store and I bought a lil' Sasquatch homie. Then on our way out, we stopped at the world's largest knife store and that place was wild too. I probably spent a little too much money, but it's alright. 

September 26, 2023

The day was pretty chill. We found these two cool ladies from a referral, Autumn and Michelle. They both want to come to church and read the Book of Mormon and get baptized, so can't complain. The first thing Autumn said to us is, "Do y'all have any cigarettes, because I need to smoke real bad," haha.. Probably not the people to ask. Later we had a dinner with the Behling's. They have like five or six little kids that were just going crazy the whole time, but it was super fun. 

September 27, 2023

Nothing too crazy happened today, it was honestly kind of slow. We went and helped Jack with some service for a good minute. He had a bunch of trees that got blown over, so we cut those up. It's finally starting to be fall here. There was this nice fall breeze today, which brought a little bit of hope to my soul haha. Later in the day we had a good lesson with Doris and Roxanne. Roxanne went on about some more conspiracies she has, but at the end we talked about General Conference and they said they'd watch some. 

September 28-29, 2023

We had Zone Conference today, which was way fun. All the trainings were heavy on Facebook finding and having all of our lines in the water. The sisters had us doing some quirkly, little trainings as always. 

For the rest of the day and then the next, Elder Escobar and I worked Lenoir City and had a good couple of days. We bought a bunch of Mexican goodies and then went and taught an English class. Our good friends Loraine, Bradley, and Luis were there. They are a sweet family, Loraine (the mom) and Bradley (the son) are from Denmark and speak four languages, and Luis is a straight Mexican homie who only speaks Spanish. Luis used to be a member that got excommunicated for some reason, but wants to make changes and come back. So that lesson was actually really sweet. Loraine is so nice, she went and got Wing Stop for us haha. 

I've kind of been combining both days a bit, so I'm just gonna keep going. On Friday morning we went and worked out at Crazy Johnny's. He had us doing some crazy, goofy stuff. Then in the afternoon on Friday, we talked to this fella, can't remember his name, but bro literally talked for 25 minutes non-stop about TN football. I don't think his wife likes us much but he was cool. He gave us some cookies. That's about it for me and Elder Escobar's exchange, it went super long because Elder Buck and Tubbs were being bozos, but it was fun.  

September 30, 2023

Conference baby! Second General Conference in my mission, let's go. First off, my goal is apparently to have each conference weirder than the last, but this one's gonna be hard to top. So we went over to Autumn and Michelle's to watch the first session for a bit. Kind of weird already because we just barely met them, but then Autumn was like, I don't want to watch conference, so we were like ok... Then we tried reading the Book of Mormon with them and she didn't want to do that either. I don't know, pretty wack visit, so we just dipped after like 15 minutes. 

They were watching conference at the church so we went there, and this weird member stood up a couple of times and put his hands in the air like he was praising. Then as we were leaving the church, Bishop found bed bugs on the couches, so no more church for anyone. During the break, we went over to Jack's and helped him cut up some more trees. Then for the other sessions, we popped over to Loudon and watched it with Lenoir and the Zone Leaders. Also we may or may not have had a six man sleepover because it was pretty late after the last session. 

October 1, 2023

Honestly a lot more chill than yesterday. We didn't have any members or friends with us for conference, so we put up a projector in our room and watched in there. I crashed a couple times but I thought conference was so amazing. There were so many talks that are exactly what our friends need and what I need. Kind of sad the Prophet wasn't there or Elder Holland.