Stephen and Elaine Biddulph: DEN HAAG NEDERLAND TEMPEL REISE

18 - 24 JANUAR 2016

Rebecca and William Merkel

This week was our planned trip to the temple in the Netherlands, so, it was a short week for phone calls. I tried to jam all of my normal weekly calls into three days. Tuesday we visited Rebecca Merkel (our branch president's wife) in the hospital with her new baby. She is doing well.
Thursday morning at 7 a.m. we left Frankfurt in our auto with Elder Joseph and Sister Marlene Anderson (directors of young single adults in Europe) and headed north to the Netherlands to Zoetermeer. The temple is known as "den Haag" temple, but it is in the town of Zoetermeer, just east of den Haag and very near Rotterdam. The trip was exactly five hours.
The Netherlands lie west of the northern part of Germany and just above Belgium. Our route took us west almost to Wiesbaden, then, north on E3 following the Rhein River past Koblenz, Bonn, Köln (Cologne), Düsseldorf, Duisburg, then, west to Arnhem, Rotterdam, and Leiden in the Nederland. It was a pleasant trip and the time seemed to go by quickly. The weather was good and the roads excellent. I drove our auto so the others were able to relax.
The Netherlands are wonderfully flat and filled with green fields punctuated by numerous canals

Biddulphs and Andersons at Temple

and water ways. It has a completely different feel to it than does Germany. We drove past the town of Goude where they make the famous Goude cheeze. The houses are also different and many are single homes, which I like much more than the German apartment buildings. I also love the windmills, the sheep and cows in the fields, the many canals, the tree-lined roads, and many bike paths. Nederland is a country rich in bike riders. It seems as if everyone rides a bike.
We drove straight to the temple in Zoetermeer, arriving there just after 1200 noon. The next session didn´t begin until 2:45 p.m., so we walked around part of Zoetermeer near the temple and found a place to have a sandwich. We enjoyed a temple session that afternoon. It was in Dutch, but we had English headphones. However, I took the headphones off and listened to the Dutch, and found it to be remarkably similar in many ways to German. I found that I could understand quite a bit.

Biddulphs and Hills at Temple

After the session, we drove over to Leiden and checked into our Hotel (The Holliday Inn), ate supper, and called it a day. That evening, President Bunnell (Belgium-Netherlands Mission) called for advice on three missionaries that I had worked with. Two are definitely returning home at their own insistence. A sister has been having blackout spells and we thought it good to have her stay with a senior couple until she is stable again. I didn´t know the name of the couple until we met them

den Haag Temple

completely unplanned on our part in the temple again on Friday morning. Elder and Sister Hill are senior missionaries from Bountiful, Utah who have been in Netherlands for 3 months. They were going to pick up this sister the next morning, and so we had a good talk about her issues and how best to help her. They seemed to really appreciate the information, and we know they will work wonders with this good sister. The Lord works in wondrous ways to care for his missionaries. Our meeting at the temple was not planned by them or the mission president. It was totally by chance on our part. Surely the Lord had a hand in bringing us together.
On Friday evening we drove down to an old part of Leiden and walked around the cobblestone streets and shops and waterfront area. It was raining like crazy, so, we didn't stay too long. We arrived back at our hotel after dark and stayed in the rest of the evening. Saturday morning, we had breakfast, then, took off for home. We followed the same route back, except at about Essen and Dortmund, the GPS took us in a different route. There must have been traffic jams along E3 because the GPS took us straight east from Essen over to Kassel and down to Giessen and back into Frankfurt. It was about the very same time, so, it all turned out well. The road from Essen east to Kassel was through higher mountains covered with a good depth of snow. Fortunately, the roads were good and no snow fell; it was just pretty foggy.

den Haag Temple (plus finger tip)

Sunday we attended church as usual. I conducted again. We had Br. and Sister Barrick at our meetings with our public affairs folks and Sister Farah of Church public affairs. Br. Barrick is the general manager for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and they are here visiting the six cities where the Choir will perform in July. It was nice to have them attend our meetings. The Grass family had their baby daughter born to them on Friday. Her name is Luna Jolie. We now have four new babies in our branch born in the last two months-two from Ghana/Spain, one from German-Brazil, and one pure German.