our trip to the motherland

This is me and my dad. For those who don't know my dad was called to be a mission president in Leeds, England and Trent and I and his parents went to visit the end of May for two weeks.
This is President and Sister Stock at the ruins in Leeds.

Behind Trent is bolten abbey close to Leeds. It's a super old abbey that is mostly ruins but the chapel is all still functioning and they even have church services.
This their version of telephone booths. They are always red, maybe so they are easy to find. My dad has a picture from when he served his mission here and then he took another one so he has one as a missionary and one as a mission president.

This is just below the bolten abbey, It was actually a little scary crossing those wood pegs they wobbled and I really really didn't want to fall in.
This is bolten abbey from afar, we hiked up pretty far to get this beautiful pictures of the green land and ruins.

This fence is a dry stone fence. Meaning it has no mortar. I tried to pick up some of the stone and move it, but they strategically placed each stone that even after hundreds of years they are still standing. Why can't we make things that last that long anymore?
This is a view from the top of Richmond castle. Isn't this just gorgeous. This is how the whole country looks. Just a beautiful green and trees everywhere and the cute little houses. There is never trash on the sides of the streets or houses that aren't being taken care of. Just Gorgeous.

These are the assistants to the president (my dad) Elder Drury on the left and Elder Vingo on the right. On their P-day they took us to three castles and just showed us around. Neither one of them are super tall but look how they can't go through the door without ducking.

On our way to Richmond castle

This is the suit that the people would put on under their armor. This stuff is so heavy that a lot of times they could not run away if they were being attacked. It's supposed to keep you from getting stabbed, but I think it would be easier to run away then try to not get stabbed. Just my opinion though.

This is Raby castle. It too is still in working condition and pictures were not allowed. The people still lived here and so we were taken on a tour, this place has it's own little chapel, so they didn't have to go anywhere if they didn't want to.

Down a ways from the castle was a huge garden and then some little shops and this one little shop had stage coaches that were used by the people who lived in the castle. They don't use them anymore so they just sit there but they sure are beautiful

This is called Harewood House. This is a huge estate where the same family has lived in it for many generations. It is still lived in and the people live upstairs and the main level has been restored and you can tour it, once again we couldn't take pictures inside but you can imagine from the outside how spectacular this inside was.

This is my parents house, too bad they don't live in the harewood house. My poor mom would be cleaning every day if they did though. They actually have a really nice house in a very nice area. Trent's brother served his mission in Leeds, England and as soon as he saw this picture he knew it was the mission home. So I don't think it has changed much in about 12 years.

Skakespears Globe Theater. To tell you a little history about London, it has over 16 million people just in the city itself. If you have a car you have to pay a congestion tax and no matter where you go you have to pay for parking. The streets are unbelievably crowded and it takes forever to get anywhere. While we were there we mostly road the bus of the subway. Well on this day we left two hours early and the streets were so crowded that we had to get off a few stops before we were supposed to and the we had to run forever and the run across the river (on the bridge of course) and then run to the theater. We got there about three minutes late and when we got ushered to our seats the people on the end of the row just looked at us like we were idiots. They were not about to budge, so I just started walking and forced them to get up. It was pretty funny. The play was a mid summer nights dream. It was pretty good, but hard to understand. None of us really knew what was going on, but it was really funny.

Just us at the theater. You could only take pictures before, during intermission, or after the play. The British are really strick about the picture taking. We also went to Phantom of the Opera shortly after the play and I think we all would say that was a big highlight. It was just so incredilble and our seats were awesome.

This is westminster abbey. This place is absolutely gorgeous inside. There are over 300,000 people buried here. Shakespear has a memorial set up but he is not buried here. In most of the abbeys we were not allowed to take pictures and if you did take pictures you were asked to delete them. They are very strick and sometimes not nice about it. I made sure to follow the rules so I didn't get in trouble. Who knows what they would do to Americans.

This is the first full day we were in London and it was pouring rain. I was soaked clear to my knees. We are standing in line waiting to buy tickets to go to the tower of london, pictured below.

The tower of London was almost like a little city in itself. There were lots of different buildings, some were where people lived, one big tower was where they kept prisoners, another was to torture the prisoners and another building is now where they keep the crown jewels. A lady tried to take pictures in here and the British Guard came running over yelling no photography and erase it now. The guard sat and went through here whold camera and erased all the pictures that she wasn't supposed to take. Now you can understand why I followed the rules. We spent almost the entire day in the tower of london. Mostly I think because it kept us out of the rain.

This is the tower bridge. The Thymes river ran right through London and you could either drive over that bridge or there is a walking bridge to the left (if the picture continued)

This is part of Parliament. This building didn't really fit with the theme of London. It is more of a Gothic period type building, but it was still beautiful. We wanted to go in so badly but Parliament was not in session so no one was allowed in. I guess we just missed it by a week. Oh well, maybe next year.

This is Big Ben which is connected to Parliament. It is really big and beautiful. You can see how massive it's structure is and it goes way high into the sky. It was a little intimidating if you stood right under it. Overall London was pretty good but by the fourth day we had seen everything we wanted to see and were ready to move on.