At the end of October, I had the most incredible experience as I spent several days at the Rome Italy Temple. The nature of the trip was for ladies within our Venice Stake to be able to attend the temple together as Relief Society "sisters". A notice was sent out by email while I was in Idaho Falls back in August, inviting us to go down to the temple from October 27-30. We would have the option to stay next door in the temple patron housing, as long as we contacted them well in advance to secure a spot. I did that immediately!! I knew right away that this was definitely something I wanted to be a part of.  As late October crept closer, two of my dear friends asked if they could ride down with me. We ended up being the only three people to go from our military ward. It would not be an easy feat for many of the mothers to leave their kids behind for almost a full week of school and extracurricular activities, while their husbands are also busy at work on the base, so I complete...

We had the most wonderful trip to Portland, Oregon a few weeks ago. The main event was our granddaughter Gwen's baptism, but we made it into a very memorable family reunion and so much more.  Day One (October 14th): I had only been home from my trip to Germany for 2 full days when we set off for the U.S. I was excited to see even more family, so I just tried to get as much sleep as I could along the way.  We flew from Venice to London Heathrow - about 2.5 hours. This was my first time in Heathrow. We knew it was a huge airport ahead of time, so we did a little bit of research before we left home by studying a map and estimating which terminal(s) we would likely fly in and out of.  Turns out that Heathrow is kinda weird . . . There are 5 large terminals, but within those terminals, there are "sub" terminals (A, B, C). We landed in Terminal 5A, but it was a long time before we figured out which terminal we needed to fly out of (Terminal 5B). Scott guessed that it was going...