New Years with Peter, Noel and Kayli Madsen - Phoenix, Arizona
January 12th, 2008New Years Eve 2007 found Katie and Reid in Pecos, Texas. We were on our way to visit Peter, Noel and Kayli Madsen in Phoenix and stopped in Pecos for the night. We celebrated the coming new year by eating Chinese food at a local restaurant and went to bed early. On New Year’s day we drove the remaining distance to Phoenix, Arizona.
Pecos is one of the areas I (Reid) served in during my mission back in 1972. At that time, the population of Pecos was about 14,000, compared to about 9,000 today. The apartment I lived in is still standing, along with many other places I remember, but many other places are gone. On the way back home, we stopped in Pecos on Saturday evening so we could attend church at the local ward — which is meeting in a relative new chapel. There were some folks there still from 1972, but as you might expect many had moved on to other places, or passed on.
The primary purpose in going to Phoenix was to visit our granddaughter Kayli Marie Madsen and her parents Peter and Noel. Kayli is a cutie with red hair, and a really mischievous smile. A few pictures of her are show here and the rest are available on the Madsen Family picture site. We went out to dinner with Peter, Noel and Kayli one night, went to Sonic on another, and visited Chucky Cheese on our last evening in Phoenix.
While in Phoenix we visited Bonnie Petersen who is Katie’s mother’s cousin. Because Katie is a genealogist, these family visits usually involve a trip to the local cemetery to find out where family members have been buried, and I have to take pictures of all the headstones for documentation. 
Ever since “The Sixth Sense” came out, I tease Katie about “seeing dead people.” After visiting the cemetery, Bonnie took us to lunch at a local sandwich shop where Katie and Bonnie exchanged genealogist “how to” information regarding Katie’s search for her grandfather Edward Spencer’s family. After lunch Bonnie loaded us up with pumellos, grapefruit, tangellos, tangerines, and oranges from the citrus trees on her property. It was a great visit.
We also visited Brian Buckmaster, an old High School friend of Katie’s. Brian works at Boeing Corporation and has worked on the Apache Helicopter project in the past and is now working on future battlefield weapon systems. We went out to lunch and Brian and I talked about technical things related to our jobs which I’m sure Katie didn’t understand — but we had fun. It was good to see Brian again.
As a side note, now that Spencer works at the Flying J in Dallas, we’ve started seeing these everywhere we go. Whenever possible we now stop at Flying J’s for our gas and meals when we are travelling. Gotta support the family you know…
Happy New Year to all of you!