Twin Falls Temple

"I like road trips, but not temple trips," David says.  He grudgingly agreed to drive me, during the weekend of October 11, 2019, to Twin Falls, Idaho, to visit my 9th new temple this year.  I do believe we had fun.

 We took the scenic route, west through the Bonneville Salt Flats.  The flats create a magical world of blue and shades of gray and white, with real pools of water and mirages that blend into one another.

We attended a temple session on Friday night, and, as always, enjoyed the beauty of the temple service and the temple itself.

Most LDS temples feature a Garden of Eden-like selection of flowers and plants in the upholstery, stained glass, and even carpets.  The Twin Falls temple included many images of the syringa flower, the state flower of Idaho.

The temple sessions were held in rooms framed with murals of Idaho landmarks, including this painting of the Twin Falls which gave the city its name.

 We ate dinner at a trendy Twin Falls restaurant, "Milner's Gate."

On Saturday morning, we drove across the flat plateau on which Twin Falls is located, to the Snake River Gorge.  As we drove down into the gorge, we could see the beautiful Twin Falls.

 The Snake River flowed peacefully between the cliffs below the falls.

The Perrine Bridge, near Twin Falls, is 1500 feet long and 486 feet high.  The morning we visited, five young people climbed with their parachutes over the railing of the bridge and soared hundred of feet to the river bank below.

Grant and His Marathon Cheerleaders

The Flindts are gifted runners.  When Grant was a senior in high school, he was the captain of the Eastlake High School cross country team, which ran at the Washington State meet.  On October 5, 2019, Grant ran his first marathon--in under three hours!  With little preparation, he beat his Grandpa Spendlove's long-hallowed 3:05 personal best!

Grant brought with him to St. George his own cheerleaders.  They included Meg (second from left), who is Grant's roommate's sister attending Utah Valley University, and a group of Meg's friends from Provo. Spencer and Naomi also came to St. George over this Conference Weekend to cheer Grant as he crossed the finish line, and then to watch Conference talks at our St. George house.

I fixed Hungarian goulash and cherry strudel for Spencer and Naomi, Grant, and his friends.  It was fun to get to know the cute girls.  One had been a missionary in Guam, and Meg's father is an immigrant from Wales who is now a radiologist in St. George.

Dining in Morocco

Casablanca!  Marrakesh!  I love the exotic, in travel and in food, and anything Moroccan is innately exotic.  On September 29, 2019, I spread my table with a purple cloth patterned with large white paisleys, lighted candles in intricate metal candle holders, and served chicken and couscous. 

I traveled to Morocco as a little girl, and I would love to go again.  Morocco has red rock cities built around Medieval castles.  It has blue cities, and it has "souks", or bazaars, with winding lanes and hawkers selling handmade rugs, leather "pouf" couches, and bright red, green, and yellow table glasses trimmed with gold leaf. 

I recently bought my own tagine, or cooking pot with long-necked lid (foreground).  For Sunday dinner, I cooked chicken with preserved lemons, green olives, and fennel, served over fluffy couscous.  My guests and I savored baklava with apricot ice cream for desert.

 Modern tagines are made of metal and cook on gas or electric burners.

 Traditional tagines are made of pottery and cook over open fires or coals.

Dave's and my guests--Mike and Heidi, Alan and Shauna, and Carol Garza--are amazingly tolerant of my cooking extravaganzas.  "I tell my children what I ate for dinner at your house," Shauna says, "and they don't believe me."

A Shower for Heidi and Audrey

On September 28, 2019, I attended the baby shower Heidi’s sister, Mauresa, held for Heidi.  Everyone is excited to meet Baby Audrey, when she arrives in a couple of weeks.  

When I arrived, pink, yellow, and green streamers festooned the room next to the Woods Cross Stake kitchen where the party was held.  "My family knows how to plan a party," Heidi has said, and that is certainly true.

I enjoyed meeting Heidi’s cousins and aunts, as well as Heidi's good friends from Church and her job.

Mauresa led some fun games, including tasting and identifying various flavors of baby food (the beef was nasty) and guessing the answers Mike and Heidi had given to questions about their baby.  They were asked what they most looked forward to about having a baby, and they both answered, “Having a little friend to play with.”  Mike and Heidi also joked about looking up their baby’s proposed name (Audrey Marie) on the internet and learning that it was the name of a female wrestler!  I won two Almond Joy candy bars for my good answers to the game questions.  I don’t usually allow myself the luxury of eating candy bars, so that was a treat.

I ordered a variety of gifts on Amazon, but they didn’t arrive in time for the shower.  I hurried to Smith's and bought a $50 Amazon gift certificate, to cover the gap, as well as a teething toy and some rubber duckies.  I told Heidi to use the $50 to buy some of the things on her Amazon gift list which she might not receive from friends and relatives.

I told Heidi how fond I am of her family, “And they love you, too,” Heidi responded.  I lent Gay Bastian, Heidi’s mom, my seven or eight blue Chinese porcelain vases for the wedding reception of Heidi’s sister, Calise, last summer, and Gay responded by bringing me, at the shower, a box of peaches and apples “right off the tree.”  Gay mentioned how glad she was that Heidi and Mike don’t feel they need to be together every minute in order to be happily married.  “I know Mike feels very close to you and that he had a great time in Ethiopia, but Heidi had a blast with us in Axtell, too!” Gay said.

Snowbird: The Aerie

 A highlight of fall, for Dave and me, is our condo week at Snowbird, the next full week after Labor Day.  This year, our week began on September 14, 2019.  We enjoy the turning leaves, the drives up and down the mountain canyons at dawn and in the evening, and the crisp air smelling of pine.  We also try each of the Snowbird restaurants during our visit.

Our two  favorite restaurants are The Lodge and The Aerie.  Both have elegant food, such as this steak at The Lodge.

 The Aerie has a spectacular view out the windows to the granite cliffs of Snowbird.  On September 19, 2019, Mike and Heidi joined us for dinner at the Aerie, and then stayed the night at the condo with us.

Ethiopia XII: The End

On the last night of our trip with Mike and Camille, September 7, 2019, we stopped by The Abyssinian night club, where we ate one last Ethiopian dinner and watched a program of Ethiopian song and dance.  Our two drivers joined us (far left and far right), as did Desale, the owner of Grand Ethiopian Tours (next to me).  Bayuh introduced us to Haile Mariam, sitting at the next table.  He joined us for a photo (to the right of Desale).  Haile is a major Ethiopian celebrity who won two gold medals at the Sydney and Atlanta Olympics in the 10,000 meter race.  He now owns a chain of luxury hotels, including the “Haile” in Aber Minch, where we spent a night, and the “Haile” in Shashmene, where we ate lunch on September 7.  Desale and Haile need each other.  Haile provides luxury hotels for Desale's wealthy tourists, and Desale fills up Haile's hotels!

        

Finally, it was time to leave, so Camille could catch her Ethiopian Airlines flight to D.C. via Ireland.  Michael came back with us to the Jupiter Hotel, to wait in the lobby until a 10 p.m. shuttle took him to the airport for his Turkish Airlines flight to New York via Istanbul.  Dave and I went to bed at the Jupiter, with mixed feelings.  Due to a scheduling mix-up, we had one more day in Ethiopia.  We were ready to go home with Mike and Camille, but there were also more adventures to be enjoyed.

On Sunday morning, September 8, 2019, I dragged out my black skirt from the bottom of my suitcase to wear to church.  After a few phone calls and circling the neighborhood, Bayuh led us to one of the four LDS chapels in Ethiopia.  Church supposedly started at 9, but when we arrived at 9:15, the chapel was locked and small groups of young people sat on benches or stood in the courtyard.  We chatted with an Ethiopian computer scientist who had just completed his schooling in Norway, and the Norwegian girl who followed him home.  Both were Church members, converted in Norway.

 A cab arrived, depositing a sturdy, very dark man and an equally sturdy, very dark woman.  We introduced ourselves and learned that the man was originally from Congo/Brazzaville, but is now working for the Church in South Africa, supervising seminary and institute programs across the continent.  The woman is from Uganda, the headquarters of the mission of which Ethiopia is a part.  The man and woman had spent the week in Addis, trying to organize seminary, institute, and Young Adult programs.  I remembered Mother saying that the Ethiopians are sensitive about color, with some light-skinned Ethiopians from the north feeling superior to the dark-skinned Ethiopians from the south.  I wondered how well all the Africans of different colors and cultures mix in LDS churches.

I wandered around the church compound, examining the Ethiopian district headquarters (behind me) and the outdoor church basketball court.

The branch president finally arrived, and Church services started at 10.  “The branch president was traveling,” a young member told us.  We met the four missionaries assigned to this branch, all from Utah, who explained that Ethiopia is a tough mission, particularly since they are not trained in the local language, Amharic, and many Ethiopians have received inaccurate information about the Church.  We heard the missionaries speak during Sacrament Meeting, accompanied by Amharic translators from the congregation, and we learned that the man from the Congo was an Area Seventy.  He spoke with power.  I wondered what he thought of the branch president who was an hour late at starting church!

The woman from Uganda shivered.  She couldn’t believe Ethiopia was so cold!  She speculated that the reason the Church is growing so slowly in Ethiopia is because Ethiopians don’t speak English as well as Ugandans do.  “In Uganda, the first words you speak to your baby are in English, and families practice speaking English at home.”  I realized that, in our two weeks in Ethiopia, we had received only a taste of what Africa is really like, including the extreme differences in cultures across the continent.

 After Church, we drove with Bayuh and our driver, Mosi, to Debra Zeit, a resort town an hour away. The town used to be called "Bishoftu", and I remembered it from my years in Ethiopia as a child.

Bayuh escorted us to the Ethiopian buffet at the Kuriftu Resort, a sister hotel to the elegant lakeside resort we stayed in on Lake Tana.  

The food was delicious, but even more memorable were all the partyers—a cross-section of Ethiopia’s upper class and elite.  We saw many families (Bayah confirmed that the Ethiopians are particularly family-oriented), and many beautiful Muslim women in gauzy headscarves and flowing robes, as well as Ethiopian Orthodox women in their flashy finest.

Mike told us, earlier in our trip, that Fanta is the most-drunk soda in the world.  It was originally owned by an Italian company but is now owned by Coca-Cola.  Pineapple Fanta is definitely not a drink I could find in the U.S.!

From our lunch table we watched kayakers slowly paddle around the lake.

After lunch, we wandered through elegant shops surrounding the resort, selling leather bags and notebooks, and cotton scarves and dresses.  We bought a jar of Ethiopian honey and a statue of a Mursi woman with a ceramic disk in her mouth.

We also peeked into a big, new Ethiopian attraction—a water park.  After visiting so many impoverished, traditional villages in Southern Ethiopia, it was quite stunning to see how the modern, wealthy Ethiopians from Addis lived.

After extricating ourselves from a traffic jam in the Kuriftu Resort parking lot, we went with Bayuh to two more crater lakes, besides the one at the resort.  The first was natural, with few visitors.  

We took a boat ride across the lake, with Bayuh identifying grebes, Egyptian ducks, and other birds.  We then walked along the shore for a while before riding the boat back to the other shore. 

Poinsettias grew wild along the shore.

As we drove back through Debra Zeit to Addis, we saw another LDS Church.  It seemed more elegant than the one in Addis.  Bayuh dropped us off at the Addis airport, and there were hugs all around.  “I was honored to be a guide for such a fine family,” Bayuh said.  We promised to write glowing reports of Bayuh and Grand Ethiopian Tours on TripAdvisor, and I did that as soon as I got home.  Since my return to SLC, I have received calls from two Salt Lakers planning trips to Ethiopia with Grand Ethiopian Tours, and I have emphasized what a wonderful time we had.