As I posted below, we went on a temple trip to the Preston, England Temple. We had to leave the house at 5:30 in order to get to the airport on time. Of course, I woke up at 3:30, and couldn't go back to sleep, but I had to get up at 4 anyway. We picked up our neighbor on the way since she lives just down the street from us. The airport lines were SO long since this is the time when all of Europe likes to take their "holiday". We realized about half-way through our line that we needed to have our boarding passes stamped since we were "foreign". Luckily, about that time we were near the last baggage check-in, so just walked up to them, they looked at our passports, stamped our boarding passes and we got back in line (whew!). It amazed me that leaving Ireland, and landing in England, we didn't go through any customs other than them stamping our boarding pass.
We flew Ryan Air, the Irish airline, and the plane ride was only about 30 minutes. They take off, then when they reach altitude, they're only there about 10-15 minutes and they announce that they are starting the decent into Liverpool. When we first saw the Ryan Air prices we were really excited because they were so cheap. What we didn't know was that all those cheap prices we saw were only the base price. So for instance: The tickets we bought were 35 Euro. Well, after fees and taxes (and they have a fee for every single thing they can think of) our tickets were really 100 Euro a piece. Yikes. They charge you more to put it on your credit card, they charge if you have a bag, they charge if you don't have a bag, they charge you if you want to be one of the first 90 people on the plane (we declined this). We found out that if you book early, that is where you save. They were having a special so we went ahead and booked our tickets for the temple trip in October. We got the base price for 1 Euro. I'm not kidding. So then our tickets ended up costing us 50 Euro apiece for that trip.
Since we were with a group, our "leader" booked a bus to take us out to Preston. Not everyone who flew over rode on our bus with us. We had almost 30 people fly over, but there were only about 17 on the bus. The rest rented their own cars. We may do that next time, because it was quite tiring to take the first flight out - at 8:10 am and take the last flight back - at 9:45 pm. We didn't get home until 11:30pm.
The Preston Temple has quite a complex around it. The temple sits up a little higher on a small hill, and down from the temple there is a church building (I think a Stake Center), a Distribution Center which has books and church materials as well as temple clothing, a Family History Center, and apartments for missionaries and temple workers.
We got to the temple (it takes an hour from the airport) in time to go to the 11am session. We ate lunch and then went to the 2pm session. We had gone to the Distribution Center before we went to the temple, but we decided we wanted to go back for something, so we left the temple a little after 4pm, but the Distribution Center was already closed. We ran into some more people for our group so decided to walk on down to the restaurant where we were all going to eat dinner. On the way there, we passed a house that had spread manure for fertilizer. I seriously thought I was going to be ill before we got away from that. I swear it smelled like the whole block had all gone in together to get manure. I kept telling my husband I wasn't sure I was going to make it without losing it, but thankfully I did.
We had to leave at 6:30 in order to get back to the airport. I think next time I'll just wait to go back to the airport for dinner. Irish food just isn't that great, and I'd just as soon eat at the Burger King at the Airport. :0)
It was a nice trip. It was nice to associate more with the ward members. It was interesting to see the Preston temple and the complex. It is a beautiful temple. It was reassuring to know that the Gospel is the same all over the world, that the ordinances are done in exactly the same way. The church is true. It really is. This is not a revelation, just an affirmation.
No comments:
Post a Comment