12-18 February 2011

Another Monday birthday celebration at the office - the third week in a row. Elder Marshall just turned 21. I made him Jonny's famous cheesecake and everyone loved it. We had two extra elders with us this day.

We picked up our newest senior couple, the Evertons, from Centerville, Utah, at the airport on Tuesday. We asked them if they wanted to go rest or go with us to a Zone Training in Antwerpen and they opted to go, even after hardly sleeping much the last 2 nights. They loved the training and being around the younger missionaries.
They are pretty amazing. They are younger than me (Paula) and so are now our youngest senior couple. She was sitting in a stake conference about 5-7 years ago and the stake president asked couples to set a goal and a date for when they would serve a mission. She wrote down 2010 and so they're here! She's been a nurse for 32 years and left a wonderful job to serve. He's an industrial engineer and also quit his job. They said they are not retired; they will go back and work and hope to find jobs when they return home. They left 5 children, the youngest is a 20 year old daughter at the U of U. Sister Everton will be our nurse specialist and help with the missionary's medical needs. Elder Everton served here as a young man so speaks Dutch.

Everyone loves to take a picture of the Brussels skyline from our office balcony, so here we are. The first night they were here, we all had dinner at the Brubakers and the next day we picked them up to take them up to our new apartment where they'll live until the office is moved up to Leiden; at that point, they'll move to another apartment and we'll move into this one. We had a brand new car for them to drive. Loel took them to buy a GPS and then they were off, following us up to the Netherlands. Elder Everton has done a ton of traveling so is pretty familiar with overseas travel and has many frequent flier miles.

We got them settled in and then drove out to the coast to the town of Katwijk, on the North Sea. We wandered around a little through this walking mall, which is very typical of shopping areas in Holland.

We wandered down the Boulevard, which is the main street that runs along the ocean. This was a cool old church along our walk.

The beach was massive with tons and tons of sand. It was a pretty sunset. Notice how empty the beach is - it's still winter, although the two days we were here, it was beautiful, sunny, and almost 60 degrees at times. (Today it's back down close to freezing.)

We stayed at a little B&B there in Katwijk - first went out to dinner and called it our Valentines celebration since we didn't have much of one on Valentines Day. Loel snapped this picture of me all bundled up in our little room, trying to get the internet to work on my little laptop - the room was very cold until the heater started working.

In the morning we went for a walk along the beach again, but it was still dark!!! This was a neat monument in front of the old church - it was all in Dutch but we think it was a mother and child mourning the loss of a father maybe, who died at sea? They are staring down at the sea (carved in the stone).

All along the beach they had these lighted monuments - not sure what they stood for but maybe this one was a bunch of fish???

Now this one was really cool. These were big metal sheets bent like paper pages. The sheets are about 1/2 " thick. They have been cut by laser with the names of all the men from the local area who died in the North Sea since 1919, listed by year with their names and ages. It went up to 2000. I asked the B&B lady if this was a particularly dangerous sea and she said, "All of the ocean is dangerous." This monument was on kind of a point - the ocean is behind me and the monument. The black stones set in front of the "pages" are men who died since 2000.

Obviously, this is a much photographed spot as the empty metal sculptured chair was just waiting for someone to sit in it and take a picture. You can see it's just getting light and the ocean behind me.

Here's that same church with the wide expanse of sand and ocean across from it, looking down into the town where the lights are. It's almost light now at the end of the walk.

If you can read the words on this hotel it says Hotel "Noordzee" - meaning the North Sea.
We had a wonderful Dutch breakfast of different breads, butter, sprinkles, fresh squeezed orange juice, hot chocolate, yogurt, meat and cheese, and a hard boiled egg. Delicious.
After breakfast we went back to the apartment where the Evertons are staying (and were delighted to realize it is just 8 minutes from that apartment where we'll eventually be living, to the ocean!) We told the Evertons as they're joggers and they were excited to try jogging along the coast. We helped them with some computer internet hookup stuff and then were off to leave the van in the Netherlands and got a ride back to Brussels. The van is needed up north as the Saldens, our senior couple friends who went home in October, are returning for their second mission here - this next week! We can't wait for their return. They've been gone for 4 months and we have missed them.