9-15 April 2011

With Shelly and Jonny here, we decided to head south in the French speaking part of Belgium to La Roche en Ardennes - a town with a cool old castle from the 12th century. This is a picture of the ruins and the town in front.

You can see Shelly and Jonny peeking out of one of the little doorway holes in the castle.

Loel took this picture from above.

A nice view of the city from the top of the castle.

There's a tank in every town in this area as it's where the Battle of the Bulge took place (in the area).

We had so much fun taking Shelly and Jonny to the Antwerpen ward and meeting lots of friends. They got a double bonus by getting to see a baptism we had after church. This is Mary, who was baptized by her son, Bright. Her daughter, Blessing, is beside Bright - and the Antwerpen sisters, of course.

This is Victor, a wonderful man who Loel really bonded with and he asked Loel to baptize him. The sisters are so great to include us in some of their teaching.

President and Sister Brubaker also had family visiting and attended the baptism. Here we are with both of our visiting families.

After church we headed up to the Netherlands, stopping at Kinderdijk on the way up. We met the Evertons up there to get the key to our Netherlands apartment. We've mentioned in the past that there are 19 operating windmills here.

Loel can't get enough of the windmills here. (True, true.)

We drove the 8 mins from our apt to the town of Katwijk on the North Sea to show Shelly and Jonny how close we are to the ocean. (And caught a nice sunset.)

And, guess who are next visitors were!!?? Andy's family with two sleeping, very tired boys who didn't sleep on the whole plane ride, but fell asleep in their strollers as they went through customs in Amsterdam!!! So there was no running into Grandma's arms here. It was so great to see them again!

We had to maximize our time, so headed straight from the airport to Keukenhof, the tulip gardens that the Netherlands are so famous for. It is only open for April and May and is the third most photographed site in the world. Andy's family did amazingly well with no sleep the night before.

It was Shelly and Jonny's last day here and Andy's first, so we had a fun time with all of them here in these beautiful gardens. And again, both of their trips, the weather was perfect the entire time.

You can barely see the rows or tulips in the background of this picture - the following week, they were much more in bloom and more pictures will follow.

A picture's worth a thousand words?

Maybe more.

I wish I could say this was my kitchen! It's the Brubakers and we traded houses with them for a night - they used our apt up in the Netherlands with their family visiting, and we used their beautiful, big home, with tons of bedrooms, for our family. Here is Eveline, cooking us a delicious meal of sweet and sour chicken that she's so famous for. She's their helper from the Philippines and was there taking care of their home, so made us a wonderful dinner.

Since it was Shelly's last night, she just HAD to have one more Belgium waffle at the Grand Place. Andy's family went to bed while we took her back for one more waffle. I think these were her favorite food in Belgium. (Of course, the strawberries, whipped cream and hot chocolate sauce helps.)
I vaguely remember Tyler running into our bedroom at 2:00 am exuberantly exclaiming, "It's the middle of the night, and I'm wide awake!" He went back to sleep shortly after.

Ok, so here we are in our favorite market by the Brubakers the next morning. So why are Shelly and Jonny still in the picture? Their flight was cancelled so they got one more day with us! At first Shelly cried as it was Ben's birthday and she wanted to be home for it, but Jonny said, "Yay, one more day in Europe!" Andy's family was thrilled to have another day to spend with them, as were we.

Loel loved the arrangements of flowers they sell at this market. (These are a miniature variety of daffodils. There's also a miniature tulip.)

Now we took Andy's family to the Grand Place to show them, and Shelly and Jonny got to come for their third time and get another Belgium waffle!!

Right outside the Grand Place, some store put out tons of stuff for the garbage, and you can see that lots of people, including us, were looking through it for special treasures! The boys found some things they liked.

We had a lot of fun, all 8 of us crammed into our tiny kitchen eating dinner together. We had even more fun with all 8 of us sleeping in our tiny apartment. We actually seemed to do well.

Before Shelly and Jonny left for the airport, they went for a jog in our beautiful park with Andy and Julia, and loved it.
They did get fly out the second day, but had a minor scare where the airplane still wasn't fixed and they were going to route them through Frankfurt where they would then miss their connection in Chicago and have to spend the night. We left them, only to find out later that Jonny ran the entire length of the airport to discover their original flight was leaving and so they barely made it on, only losing one bag (which was delivered 3 days later).

After leaving the airport, we took Andy's family to our mission office to see what we do, enjoy the beautiful view, and meet the office elders. We walked to our favorite lunch place and got kebops with the elders. Tyler made friends with a nice man with a big motorcycle who was so impressed with all of us, that the elders were able to make a contact with him afterwards! Tyler's already a good missionary. He's not afraid to talk to anyone.

Here we are on a boat ride on a canal in Brugge, which was our next day's activity.

Brooke and Jake, my niece and nephew in law, joined us for the day as they were also here at the same time. It was really fun to have them with us. Tyler immediately bonded with Jake and was his special friend, telling him at the end of the day, "Jake, you're a lot of fun."

Here's Tyler on a little motorcycle thing with Andy taking a picture of him. Andy took hundreds of pictures while on this trip. He LOVED Brugge.

Cute Brooke and Jake in one of the town squares.

This was actually one of the highlights of the trip for me. Andy made sure to bring a suitcase big enough to fit the boys' swords and shields, so they could have a sword fight in front of a castle. This is the castle we had stayed at the week before outside of Brugge with Shelly and Jonny, so we drove back there for the sword fight.

Here are the men in battle.

And after the battle - they were victorious, of course!

So the next day they got to do it all over again, this time in front of the Steen Castle in Antwerpen. A whole group of Japanese tourist came up and got such a kick out of them having their sword fight - they took lots of pictures and one man grabbed Tyler, picking him up and hugging him!

The famous statute in the Grote Markt in Antwerpen - Andy's getting Tyler to pose in front of it. Brabo, the hero of Antwerpen, has vanquished the giant, cut off his hand and is throwing it into the river Schelde. There's more to the story, but I can tell you that when we get home.

We had Brooke and Jake with us again today as we drove up to the Netherlands to stay in our apartment up there and to attend the Donny Osmond fireside. This is kind of a crummy picture of his family, singing a couple of primary songs (Elder Osmond is in front; Donny is on the far right). These three firesides were extremely successful with our mission receiving over 150 referrals from people who want to learn more!
Andy enjoyed visiting with one of Donny's sons who had served in Italy with him. Donny sang one song (we wish he had sung a few more) and gave a great missionary fireside, explaining his beliefs, having his son, Elder Osmond, whose in our mission, bare his testimony, and also gave a great gospel discussion. We were very pleased with the results.