| Quickly, everyone packed up and stowed their
luggage in our room -
that way, Pat could get started on the others right away. |
| At breakfast, we realized that one person was missing, and no one had seen her - Rachel was AWOL at 8:00AM! Dave bravely knocked her up (as Sherlock Holmes would say), and it turned out that she thought we had until 8:30, and kept dropping back off to sleep. |
| Anyway, Mr X (we can't remember his name) picked us up in our Johnson's mini-coach. What!! The only time since pickup that we have people AND luggage, and they send us the small vehicle for which we're paying, not the huge coaches we got when we didn't need them?! |
| After making it through Bristol and its heavy
traffic, we stopped at the Services to eat our last Nando's lunch.
It was nearly universally disliked, and has come to be referred to as the
"Dog-Meat-Sandwich Lunch".
(Some of that reaction was exacerbated by our missing Stonehenge, simply because it was completely out of our way.) |
| Shortly after lunch, we found the name and
number of the church which was our destination, and stopped at the next
Services to call Mark Pengelly, the Lay Worker at Avenue Methodist Church
in Newton Abbot, and he arranged for our host families to meet us at the
church.
(an aside, Mark has since been ordained an elder in the church, and is a pastor at Chesterfield, near Sheffield in the Midlands.) |
| We lucked out beyond imagining.
Our hosts were Sydney and Dorothy Williams at their lovely home, Carvean, at the top of the hill. |
| After leaving the box of worship booklets in the narthex, Sydney and Dorothy whisked us off to their home, where we met their son and daughter-in-law, Charles and Jo, and their daughter, Emma. |
| After a cup of tea, we settled our stuff into
our rooms, and headed for the barbecue at Mark's parents' farm (where David,
Christie, and Allison were staying) to welcome all of us - but only incidentally;
it was really planned to welcome their visiting pastor (from Pittsburg,
KS!) who was on a pulpit exchange with Malcomb (?) their usual pastor. |
| Both before and after, Sydney took us on a
car tour of the
beautiful! surrounding area, including Torquay and many small villages. Christian has yet another set of grandparents! (And, they have foxes living in their garden!) |
|
|
| (coming soon) |