Sunday, March 24, 2024
Well, I can’t we slept great. Our $35 Amazon mattresses are ok, but not great. And I think it was just a bit weird for the kids to be sleeping in a church -- with its dim light, old smell, and strange sounds. In the evening we could hear the bells tolling and the priests shuffling around in their quarters.
Our main goal for today was to see the Rome temple. Unfortunately, it is closed for cleaning now, so we won’t be able to do any ordinances, but we are able to visit the grounds and the visitors center and go to church.
One thing about the Rome temple, is that it is not in Rome. The same could be said about the other temples in Europe. London is about an hour outside of London, Paris isn’t in Paris. The same is true for Frankfurt or Rome.
Rome was particularly hard for us to get to. Saint Eusebius is about as close to the main train station as you can get, but it still takes about an hour on the bus to get there in the best circumstances. It took us longer than we had anticipated to get our bus tickets and get on the right bus, but eventually we made it -- about two hours after we left where we were staying.
What the Rome temple lacks in convenience, it more than makes up for in beauty. It’s stunning. Just amazing. And the visitors center is great as well. We spent a lot of time chatting with the sister missionaries there, and by the time we were done, they were exchanging emails with the girls so that the missionaries can receive the girls’ updates while we are on the trip.
(By the way, Alicia’s weekly letters have inspired me to invite the other kids to write updates. If you’d like to be on their email list let me know).
This temple tour has really been something else. In just three weeks we have been to the Paris, Holland, London, Frankfurt, Switzerland, and Rome temples.
Sacrament meeting was nice, but I think we were all a bit too tired to really enjoy it -- and it was in Italian.
The bus ride back was about as complicated as the ride out. And we stopped halfway to get some food. Everyone was very tired, and that generally means grumpy. But we had a good talk and I think got things sorted.
One big question was what to do with the rest of the day.
I didn’t want to leave Rome without taking a nice walk through the city and seeing some of the great monuments that are here. But I knew everyone was tired, so we counseled about it, and I offered to let anyone stay home who wanted to rest. Everyone told me they wanted in.
So we too the bus and then train all the way to Vatican City and then took a long stroll from St Peter’s to Castel, Sant’Angelo (Hadrian’s tomb), Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, the Temple of Hadrian, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps (another Mission Impossible moment), and we finished with San Pietro en Vincoli -- where Michelangelo’s Moses statue is, and where we arrived just as they were closing. We barely got it.
My thoughts on Rome. For art and architecture, it’s incredible. One of the things I just mentioned would be the jewel of any other city in the world. To have it all in one place is mind blowing. But the crowds in Rome were also totally overwhelming. Most piazzas were wall-to-wall people. It was difficult to even see anything. And it’s tough navigating all of that with kids.
So Rome was sort of a mixed bag. But I would definitely come back. I want to go inside many of these places -- especially St Peter’s.
From San Pietro in Vincoli it was just a bit further to a grocery store where we got some food, and then we headed home to eat and pack.
As we ate, I asked the kids what they have learned or how they feel they have grown so far on this trip. Their answers were all great. They are learning to be tough, to not be anxious in big cities and crowds, to take care of their stuff, and to be OK when things don’t go as planned. I liked Betty’s answer the best, though. She quoted from President Hinckley who quoted someone else about how life is like an old time rail journey.
Also, today I’ve really been feeling stressed about the next stage of the journey. There is a part of me that wants to get hiking on the Camino now. This train travel has been amazing, but the Camino beckons. The sooner we get started on it, the sooner we will finish. There is another part of me that wants to show the kids Spain. And there is another part that wants to wait as long as possible to start so that the weather can improve. Rain is forecast for every day this week.
A couple of really important things happened today that helped me out. First of all, I was able to get in contact with my friend Gorka, who lives in Pamplona, very near the start of the Camino. He said we can stay with him and his family before we start.
Then, on a whim I contacted my friend Elsa, who served in the Madrid mission at the same time I did. I stayed with her and her husband Chris while I was staying in Barcelona studying Catalan years ago.
Anyway, right before bed I got an email from Elsa saying that they are going to Madrid to the temple this week, and we can stay in their home in Barcelona as long as we like this week.
That means we can spend some time showing the kids Barcelona -- a city Betty and I love -- and we can have a few days of rest before we start hiking -- and we can wait out this rainstorm a bit. I can’t adequately express what a relief it is to me. It is the tenderest of tender mercies.