It has been a crazy three weeks. We spent the week of the 1st in Dunedin helping out with the new missionary couple coming in. They are the Webbs from Centerville and they are really sweet people. Dunedin is beautiful but I guess it can get pretty cold. It is cold here so 3 hours further south can't help but be more cold!
We came home Thursday night in time to get ready for our wedding and baptism. It was a good thing we did because there was much to do. The wedding came off Friday morning about 12 and the baptism ended up being held at the chapel rather than the due to weather. You never know here, it's kind of like Utah! Anyway, it was wonderful. I have been trying to donwload the wedding and baptism pix for a slideshow but so far, no luck with that. Will keep trying.
We cleaned up on Saturday, had meetings all day Sunday and then headed to Auckland on Monday at 4 in the morning. We arrived in Auskland in time to catch the van to Hamilton 1 1/2 hours away. We spent the week at the temple. It is a beautiful place and we had a wonderful week. We worked in the baptistry every day, Tues thru Fri. and hit multiple endowment sessions topped off by a sealing session with our branch members getting family names done. One of our members was sealed to her adult daughters which was so nice for them. Her husband died less than a year ago.
We went to the Hamilton Botanical gardens which are really beautiful. There are gardens for England, Italy, Japan, China, India and the US that we were able to visit. I am sure we missed some of them. Took tons of pictures. On the way home Saturday, we were able to visit the Auckland MTC which was very interesting. They are prepping for double the amount of missionaries with the age change. Flew home Sat. afternoon, got home about 7 and went for groceries and a couple of other things and collapsed.
Sunday we showed 3 sessions of conference with a linger longer between. On Monday, we started trying to catch up with all that didn't get done the previous 2 weeks. It is amazing how hard it can be when you leave a bunch of things behind to catch it all up! I think we have pretty well done it though. A non-member couple who are friends called because she was having surgery and we spent most of one day with them. Add in institute and lessons for our investigators plus all the other church duties and it has been pretty busy. Oh well, we like it because we really feel like we are needed and accomplishing something here.
I am so grateful we got to go to the temple. It was a wonderful experience. We walked around it every time of day and night. At night, it looks like it is floating in the air. The weather was awesome until Saturday when we left, then it was raining like crazy and blowing even worse. Guess it was time to go home. I love my own little bed in Timaru.
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