November Apartment Inspections - Pies

Ok, I know you are probably getting tired of the Inspection tour pictures, but this time, Sister B found some new settings on the camera and had fun taking a few pictures that came out better than our usual pictures.

This time, instead of the usual cookies or other kinds of bribery treats, she made pies to give the missionaries. I can say I cut up the apples and stirred together the pumpkin pie filling, but she did the hard part. She doesn't really like making the crusts. (She REALLY misses Mary and Mark who usually do the crusts for her at home at Thanksgiving).

Leaving Ravensburg early in the morning. 

Sister B's trusty notebook (trying out the "closeup" setting).

Getting off the ferry in Konstanz.

Elders in Richterswil. One from Bulgaria and the other from Finland. Lake Zurich in the background.

We got pictures of most of the missionaries, but I thought it was a bit much to put them all in the blog here.

As we were approaching Ebnat, the temperature hit zero (32°F) and there was snow in the ground.

Sister B has wanted to get this picture for a long time. With the new camera setting, it came out pretty good. It is a bridge over a nearby river near Wattwil.

This was not quite as good, due to glare, but it is a long covered bridge near the other bridge.

At every stop we gave the missionaries a selection of the pies in the back of the car: Apple, Dutch Apple, Pumpkin and Banana Cream. Here I am serving the Dornbirn Elders.

And here is a candid shot (Taken by Sister B). I love the expressions...

Visitors

We have had visitors each of the last two Sundays. Sister B has mentioned them in her Weekly Epistles. Elder and Sister Mower came to visit our branch the previous Sunday and Elder and Sister Didenhover visited this past Sunday. I mentioned them in one of my previous blogs, but I did not have a picture.

Posing with them is a good sister who knew him when she was a little girl and he was a missionary here. This is the first she has come to church in a long time.

The Didenhovers have visited Ravensburg occasionally over the years. She was raised here and was baptized here as a young woman. They are now serving as senior missionaries in Linz. We had a wonderful visit with them. They stayed in our home for the weekend and they also talked in church on Sunday. It was a wonderful spiritual experience.

Sister B took this picture of them as they were walking about town.

We picked them up from the train station in the city of Lindau. Here are a few pictures we took as we were going to pick them up. Lindau is interesting. The main (original) part of the city is on an island in Lake Constance (Bodensee). This first picture (above) is on the mainland, a ways before getting to the island.

Crossing the bridge to the island.

Some of the old buildings of Lindau.

Getting decorated for Christmas

On the harbor in Lindau.

another harbor picture

Here I am at the train station on the island.

Castle Zeil

I hope you don't mind traveling with us on some of our outings. Yesterday, we had a little mixture of business and pleasure. It was Preparation Day, so we can do a few of those things with the elders (sight seeing, etc.), but the elders still had some missionary work in the process.

First, we went up to Bad Waldsee, about 20 miles north of us. "Bad" means Bath, or health resort. When cities meet certain criteria, they qualify to have the word "Bad" added to their name. It usually involves some therapy resort where people can come for rehabilitation or health purposes, often a hot springs or something natural.

Anyway, in Bad Waldsee, we visited a man who was visited by the missionaries a year or so ago. He wondered why they stopped coming to see him. We had a nice visit with him. After that, we visited one of our elderly sisters who is in a care center here. We sang to her and gave her the sacrament. After that, we visited a man in city further out who has lost contact with the church and we have newly established contact with him. He had a stroke recently and is doing better.

After our visits, we went a little farther to the Schloss Zeil, a castle on a hill overlooking the valley where the freeway runs. We look a lot of pictures, but I will only show a few. It was getting dark, so some were not as good as they could have been, but it was an interesting place. This is not a popular castle and did not have any kind of tours or facilities. We just walked around and took pictures. People still live in it and most of it is not open for the public.

 These two are just of the land area we went through on our way to the castle. This actually was in the area of Bad Wurzach where we met with the man last mentioned.

Also near there we saw a lot of stacks of wood, preparations for the winter.

Welcome to the castle.

Posing next to the guard (painted on the wall - not me, the guard)

a nice fountain in the middle (without water)

painted on the ceiling in a passageway. Sister B thought it looked like Kermit the Frog.

Near the overlook out into the valley below.

 And a couple pictures of the valley view. See the freeway in the distance

There was a herd of deer right by the castle. Look at those antlers.

Here is a church which is part of the castle. Most all castles also have churches.

This was painted on the ceiling. The room was very dark, but my flash on the camera helped.

OK. This last one has nothing to do with the castle. We took that picture earlier. It shows the main highway between Bodnegg and Tettnang, two small cities in the area. As you can see, the road goes right through a barn. At this point, the speed limit is 100 kph (about 60 mph). I hope no one tries to go that fast through the barn.

Meetings

We have had some good missionary meetings over the past week or so. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, we were in Singen, Germany for Zone Training and Zone Conference meetings. We stayed the night with the Gurneys, the Senior couple serving there. Zone Training is a set of meetings where the Zone Leaders bring training and information they received recently in a leadership meeting in Munich. They teach us a lot of things we need to do as missionaries and help us work on our goals in our work. It is not common to have this meeting back-to-back with Zone Conference, but that is how it happened this time. Zone Conference is a meeting where we are taught by the Mission president and his wife, along with the Assistants to the Presidents. We have a goal for the mission to have 290 baptisms for 2013. So far we have 110. They talked about miracles, and we are seeing them. In order for the Lord to bless us, we need to be obedient and the miracles will continue to come.

I got a few pictures, though we were pretty involved with things so there are not many, but for the families back home following the blog, I wanted to make sure I got a couple.

Here we are gathering for an official picture. We hope to see that picture soon. It is kind of fun to see the confusion in getting us all together for the picture.

The Singen district sang a beautiful hymn. Elder Pope is in the district. We were so happy to see him at the conference.

Elder Christensen will be going home in January so he was asked to bear his testimony.

We hope he won't be transferred next week.  We get pretty attached to our Elders.

Today we had our regular district meeting. This includes the elders serving in Dornbirn, Austria and they come on the train to join us. I snapped a quick picture just before we started eating.

 The rest are some fairly random pictures. The first one is a building where they held services here in Ravensburg in the late 1960's. We had a nice visit from Elder and Sister Mower. They are a missionary couple serving in Innsbruck. He served a mission here 43 years ago and was the branch president here. The meeting house back then was on Zeppelin Strasse 11. They held their meetings on the bottom floor where all the windows are.

Now for randomness...

We got approval to get two beds for our second room. Pictured here is the load. I was going to take the picture before we unloaded, but forgot. There is no way I was going to load it up again, just for a picture. Also pictured are our groceries (black bags) and dozens of copies of the Book of Mormon in various languages (smaller boxes by me). Yes, this all fit in the car in one load.

We see this flock of geese along the road near our church quite often. I finally had the camera with us for the picture. Sister B took the photo.

We picked up a jigsaw puzzle at the second-hand shop. It had two puzzles together in the same box, this one of modern Athens and another of ancient Athens. Sister B put them together, and yes, all the pieces were there.

Stake Conference

We had stake conference last weekend. The Saturday meetings, including a leadership meeting in the afternoon, were all held in a chapel in Winterthur, Switzerland. I am always impressed when we get the members of the church together to see the power that is in a gathering of the Saints. There are really wonderful and caring people here, besides the few we know and love in our little branch.

One of the training sessions was about missionary work and making family mission plans. The most powerful suggestion that was made was how our family home evenings can be a powerful influence on the friends of our children. Of course it is different here in Europe, with so few members, but even at home in America, if our children's friends feel comfortable coming over and seeing the example of our children in a gospel centered life, it can have a profound effect on other families who may be struggling in the gospel or may not be members. One thing they mentioned was that, as the friends of the children were over and happened to stay for a meal, they became accustomed to praying before meals. Then when they were home, they asked their parents about praying before meals. In most cases, the non-member family parents were positive and appreciated that influence in their home.

The trip to Winterthur took about 2 hours (one way) and we were fairly late getting home that night. We were blessed to be able to ride with a member, so we could save on expenses together.

The Sunday session was in the city of Weinfelden, in another part of the stake in Switzerland. There are no buildings in the stake large enough to accommodate the meeting so they meet in a convention center there. This time we got there early enough to get better seats than last time we had conference there. They had a wonderful family orchestra and choir provide the music for the session. They had a large stage behind the speakers and it was well filled with about 100 people in this orchestra and choir, including many small children. Their first (opening) song was an arrangement of "Give, said the Little Stream." I hope to get a picture of the choir and will add it to this post when I do.

The meeting was really wonderful. Sister B had headphones for the translation in English. I understood most of it and struggled only on a couple of times when the Swiss dialect was particularly strong. The closing talk was by the stake president, President Conrad, who talked about dealing with depression, quoting some from Elder Holland's recent conference talk. He had a powerful message for us all about being patient and relying on the Lord to get through our struggles and the power of getting preisthood blessings to help in our difficulties.

We had the elders with us as we traveled on Sunday. On the way back, we took the "short cut" over the mountain. It was raining, but I wanted to show a couple of pictures. The last two are actually from another trip, but I added them here.

and the others:

This one is from near our city, showing the alps in the distance - actually in the direction of where we went for Stake Conference.

More fall colors

The Wiengarten Basilica

We took a little excursion last week to see the Catholic Basilica in Weingarten (the next town north of us). It is famous because they have some blood of Christ there (according to legend).

This is the walkway up to the building. The main building is under construction (restoration) so they put up huge pictures of the building in front of the scaffolding.

The main ceiling fresco depicts the event of the Roman soldier who was converted by a stream of light from the cross and used a cup to catch some of the blood of Christ, which is in this chapel.

We were fortunate to be able to join a group that was going through the Basilica at the time,

This is the famous altar.

Around home and church

I thought I would post some more pictures of where we live and are about most every day. They are pretty ordinary for us now, but they might be interesting to you.

We are on the third floor, but in Germany, they start numbering the floors after the bottom floor, so to them we are on the second floor. Here are our stairs. We often wish we had an elevator here.

This is a typical view in an apartment building. People often leave their shoes outside the apartment door.

Our building front door and our mailboxes. We get a lot of advertisements and newspapers stuffed in the boxes as you see here.

As we leave our front steps, we always see this "castle." It is really just a shed building or something that the neighbors built. The flag on the top the flag of Ravensburg.

This is the walkway towards the street. It is a very busy street, just singles lanes for each direction, but a major (only) thoroughfare for all traffic coming in and out of Ravensburg headed this direction. The concrete bin cabinets on the left are where we put our garbage can. The big green ones out on the street are for paper and cardboard recycling

This is the row of garages. Ours is the last one. We are actually quite lucky to even have a garage, though it is really quite narrow. I have only dinged the car twice on it.

Over the hill from our place is this pathway - a very long stairway going to the top of the hill towards our house from the main part of the city. There are 274 steps on this pathway.

Here it is a ways farther up.

This is at the church. We do have an elevator there, but it is a bit crazy. It stops working at times. The stairs go around the elevator. We are on the 4th (third) floor in the business building.