When we woke up, it was a bright, beautiful, sunny day. We got dressed for church, packed up our stuff, ate some breakfast, and headed off to Newport to visit the high street. My white dress shirt was wrinkled, and I didn’t feel like asking to borrow an iron, so I just put my nice black sweater over it. Problem solved. 🙂 Anyway, it was interesting to check out the high street there as I couldn’t recall a thing about it. I suppose I was only there for one transfer, though. After that, we went to see the flat I live at (the missionaries don’t live there anymore, thank goodness) and headed to church. Once at church, we read our scriptures in the car and headed inside.
Sacrament meeting was really good. They had three adult speakers, which was a first for me, I think. Sunday was good, in that there were lots of discussions, but the teacher taught the lesson pretty much verbatim out of the manual. It was actually kind of fun to look in the manual and guess which question he was going to ask next. Elder’s Quorum was good as well (they actually had a high priests quorum too) with plenty of good discussions. Once church was over, we got a picture with the Kreibergs and headed off to the Ellis’ house to change and say goodbye (with a photo!) and then head off to the ferry.
The trip back to Portsmouth was kind of interesting. Since we were early, they had us park on the second level. However, since we were there the earliest, we parked on the ramp leading to the second level and they told us to stay in our car until the ramp had lifted up for cars to park underneath it. That was kind of fun. Even though it was a bit chilly, we went to the top outside deck as we were approaching Portsmouth to take a photo since it was still a bit sunny. While we were up there, a group of about 20 or 30 kayakers went past. Of course, we waved and one even waved back! 🙂
This whole day, I was hoping to get in touch with Joe Galsworthy to see if he could visit. You see, while we were in Bristol, we weren’t able to visit with him when we saw his father because we were told (supposedly his phone was messed up so he couldn’t respond to me) that he had to take a scaffolding job in Southampton. We thought that could actually work out great since Southampton was right on our way to the car ferry. On our way there, he never responded, so we didn’t see him. On this Sunday, however, he did respond. That said, he told us that he was actually working in Bournemouth, and he would know if he was going to be working in Southampton by 1 or 2. He also told us that he felt inspired to do some missionary work there but given he isn’t active, I don’t know what that was on about (he does still have his testimony, so who am I to judge, I suppose). During church, he then told me 2 or 3. Either time would have worked great for a quick visit as we were headed to Oxford, but unfortunately, I never heard from him after that. I was really bummed that I wasn’t able to see him. I was really excited about seeing him. Oh well.
The drive to Oxford was nice with only occasional clouds. We are going to be about 45 minutes early to our dinner with the Nicholls in Abington (south of Oxford) so we decided to stop at a service stop along the way to take a nap (always nice). Right as we parked, we got a text from the mother saying that Dan hurt his leg and they were headed to the hospital. That was all it said, and being unsure if that meant dinner was canceled, we texted them if it would still work to have us over for dinner. As we drove off after finishing our nap, we hadn’t heard back them, so assuming they were busy at the hospital and thus unable to responded, we figured it wasn’t going to happen and headed off to Oxford to get dinner and settled at our Airbnb place. As we driving around the Ring Road, we got a text from Sister Nicholls saying it still OK to come by. We got this about 5 minutes after we were supposed to be at their house, so we called them to apologize and headed back to Abingdon. Turned out they did send it after I asked about it, but it just didn’t get delivered until it was late. Oh well.
Anyway, dinner with them was fun. At first, it was just Brother and Sister Nicholls and Lucy. However, Dan was done at the hospital (and was with Becky), so Brother Nicholls left shortly after we started eating and then soon everyone was there. It was really fun to visit them. I almost forgot how fun it was to go over there for dinner appointments as a missionary. They even busted out their family testimony book (T-book) and show the empty page meant for me. Since I didn’t take care of it way back in 2009, they gave it back to me to finish up while I was in Oxford. Haha, good times. We would have loved to have stayed longer, but in consideration of our hosts, we didn’t want to get checked in too late at our Airbnb spot (we were already later than promised), so we took a picture with them and headed on our way.
The placed we stayed in Oxford was nice. It was located in East Oxford, which was nice as it was an easy walk to the town center where all the cool stuff is. Parking was tight though as we had to park at end of the street pressed up against some bushes. The hosts were nice and the room was fairly large with a sitting area at the front. They even had two cats, which unfortunately meant cat hair on the pillows and bed spread. I wish that would have been cleaner, but it was fine under all that. We then relaxed for a while and conked out.
