London and Lake District Trip

We made it back from England, We had a wonderful time with Kirsten and Justin. I won't bore you with a day by day travelogue, but instead will just share some of the highlights.

First was the flight. The seats were configured 2 4 2 so I put Mom and Spencer together and I sat by myself. Both directions I sat next to really nice people. We talked about lots of things, and even talked about the church both times. In fact on the way out the guy wanted to know all about the church, so I told him about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and what Temples are for.

Next was Church on Sunday. The Romsford ward is kind of small, Spencer called it a branch which Kirsten didn't appreciate. Priesthood was most interesting. The Elders quorum president is French, and the quorum is really small. In fact there were 9 of us there, 2 missionaries, Justin and I and 5 from the ward. But the best part is how diverse it is. Of the 9 people in the meeting, only 3 were from England. As I said the Pres was from France. There were 2 members origionally from African nations, one of the elders was from Dresden Germany, the other from Kaysville UT, and me. So only Justin and 2 of the other ward members were from England. With all of the accents it was very cool. One of the African members bore his testimony of personal revelation as it pertained to his conversion story, which was very cool. But the whole experience was great because the church really is the same where ever you go in the world.

The Cottage. The place Kirsten found to stay at was awesome. It was really big, 4 bedrooms, two stories, a nice family room with two big couches and an overstuffed chair for reading, a great TV set with satallite. There were two big bathrooms with great showers and tubs. And a great kitchen with a table big enough for all of us to eat together. It was perfect. But don't think it was just a boring house. it was post and beam construction, with exposed beams and a 6' (almost) ceiling that Spencer and I had to kind of duck our heads as we walked around, which was kinda cool. Justin and I's favorite activity was playing with the Wii. They brought up 3 games, Sports, a Brain game, and Resident Evil. I wasn't very good at Resident Evil. I must have gotten my head cut off with a chain saw like 20 times. It was really funny. But I redeemed myself with the other games. The sports game has baseball, tennis, golf, bowling and boxing. I got pretty good at all but the boxing, and was able to keep up with Justin at all of the others.

The Mine. We went to the coolest mine. It is a slate mine, where they get the rock that they make stone roofing tiles from. This particular mine is the one they got the slate for Buckingham Palace and St Peters Catheral from. It was very interesting to hear about how hard life was for the miners, and why they mined the slate, and how they made the tiles. And walking through the mine was really cool. I hit my head really hard twice, so I was very glad we had hard hats and miners lights.

Truck Spotting. Justin has a new hobby. There is a trucking company that has these green and white trucks. Lots of them, thousands of them, and they name each one with a girls name. Things like Emma Louise, or Wendy or Ema Jean, they even have a Paris Hilton... anyway there is a club that you can join that sends you a book with the names of all of them. Then as you drive around and spot them you write down the name, where you saw it and the date. Then when you get home you enter it into a website and you get ranked against all of the other spotters. So as we drove around Justin and I tried to read the names off of the trucks on the other side of the freeway. We got something like 30 of them, which was good enough for Justin to break into the top 1000 spotters. Great fun.

The roads. The roads are crazy narrow, and the speed limits are crazy fast. The country roads are all 2 lanes, 2 narrow lanes (think that really narrow section of Norris) that are always squeezing down to one lane, often on blind corners. And the speed limit on them is 60 mph on these crazy roads, which is more of a challenge than a limit. All I can say is I am glad Justin was driving. Don't get me wrong, the roads are beautiful, and fun to drive on, but I am sure he was stressed out.

The Lake District. OK, now to talk a bit about the Lake Country. It really is beautiful. First off everything is green, and organized. Even in winter, the fields get lots of rain and the sheep keep the grass mowed, so it was all very beautiful. My favorite thing are the walls. Instead of barbed wire fences, they have walls in their fields. Some of them date back many hundreds of years. The fields don't have any rocks in them, because they were all picked up long ago to make the walls. these walls go on for miles and even go up and over mountains. They are the coolest thing. In fact the roads and wall sometimes came together as we drove down 1 lane roads with 7' walls on both sides of the road with green fields full of sheep on both sides of us. It was like driving down a narrow canyon very cool.

But the best part of the trip was spending time with Kirsten and Justin. And we had lots of time to do that. Basically, other than sleeping, we were with them. Whether we were sitting around their flat and talking, 26 hours in the car driving around the countryside, eating good food in restaraunts, playing games on the Wii, watching East Enders or touring cool sites like castles, mines, ruins, stone circles, visting waterfalls, or walking down beautiful paths, we were able to really enjoy their company.

All in all it was a great trip.