Week 6 - Arrival in Amsterdam !

windmill near the mission home

Dear Families:

Yesterday at 12:30 pm your missionaries arrived in the Belgium Netherlands mission.  As you may or may not know, due to storms in the US, their flight was delayed and they missed their original flight to the Netherlands.  Monday night they spent the night in the mission home of the Dallas-Fort Worth Mission.  Tuesday they flew to JFK in New York City where they caught the flight to Schipol Airport in Amsterdam.  They have had quite the adventure.

Sister Riley is serving in Groeningen with Sister Meier as trainer and companion

President and I want to thank you for your faith and love in sending your missionaries out to serve the Lord.  You are in our prayers and we are looking forward to wonderful events and experiences.

Liefde,

Sister Robinson

  Zuster Riley with her mission president and his wife, and Elder Melligan (who traveled with her for 2 1/2 days from Provo to SLC to Abilene to Dallas to NYC to Amsterdam)

With their trainers

Note: On Eliza's flight from SLC to Dallas on Monday, thunder storms (and running out of gas) forced the plane to land in Abilene, TX. Eliza and Elder Melligan had made friends with a nice LDS man on the flight (who is the father of a missionary in Ohio) and they rode with him in his rental car for 3 hours to Dallas. After spending the night at the mission home in Dallas, Eliza and Elder Melligan flew to NYC where they "contacted" and handed out mormon.org cards during their 8-hour layover Tuesday afternoon. Finally Tuesday night (late) they flew to Amsterdam and arrived at lunchtime Wednesday. The GOOD thing about all of these delays was that I got to talk to Eliza several times! She is allowed to call from airports when traveling to her mission, so she called with a calling card from the SLC airport, then she called on the nice man's cell phone while driving to Dallas, then she tried calling me from NYC with her calling card. I was chaperoning Josh's band concert Tuesday evening and couldn't answer the phone while getting the performers on stage, but after my group's performance was over, I checked my phone and had 2 missed calls. I felt awful to have missed my last chance to talk to my daughter for 7 more months, so I ran outside and called back the phone number. And what a tender mercy -- the call to the pay phone went through and Eliza answered! Her calling card had run out of minutes after she'd left me a message, and she was sitting sadly by the pay phone. We got to talk for a while, but when I figured I'd better get back to corraling the rowdy middle-schoolers, I told her I'd give Dad her number so he could call her, too. He called the number and talked to her for about 20 minutes before the call cut off. Then when he (and later Josh and I) tried to call back repeatedly, all we got was a sound like a fax machine. But we were so grateful that we were able to call her and talk to her one last time before she flies to the other side of the world! She was in good spirits, and the delays didn't really phase her; this was nothing compared to her airport adventure in December (trying to fly home for Christmas the morning after getting her wisdom teeth out, getting delayed and spending the night in the airport with no pain killer and trying to negotiate switching flights while her mouth was swollen and bloody). This time, she was healthy and not alone!

 Our "3 Nephite" with our first of 2 rental cars, in Abilene, Tx (I would've been on the plane to Amsterdam by then haha)

 New York skyline (taken from the airport window)! So tempting to go there in our 8 hours, but our instructions to stay at the airport were pretty clear....