Update On Our Temple Mission: Summertime

Nyhavn - Old Seaman's Harbor

Old Building Grouping

We have waited for a Danish summer since we arrived twenty-two months ago. It finally arrived this week. We have experienced a full week of intense sunshine and temperatures in the seventies. It was so warm I was sure the temperatures were in the nineties; however, we had some visitors to the Temple from Saudi Arabia who felt chilled and needed a jacket. It’s all relative.

Our morning walks have increased both in frequency and length. We decided to walk to downtown and then to the harbor and take the harbor city bus boat on its route up the canal. We didn’t want to be restricted with things, so we didn’t take the camera or anything else that would need to be carried. Of course, walking through some unfamiliar side streets in the old town, we saw some “picture perfect” sites. That meant we would need to retrace our steps another day with the camera.

Old Street Near the City Hall

While out on an errand one day, a few months ago, I stopped to visit the graves of Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard and Niels Bohr. They are all three buried in the same cemetery. It is about a mile from where we live. I thought a visit there would be of interest to Norma so we did that walk this week also. The very large cemetery is treated as a park. It was as if the majority of Copenhagen’s population was soaking up the first rays of the summer sun. There were sunbathers every place.

Another day I left Norma in the middle of some important research and went to Birkerød to repeat some summer photography of the old family farm area (for some reason my computer cannot find the originals of my previous summer photos of Birkerød and Kajerød). I also wanted to take some photos of the present day route from Kajerød to the Birkerød church as depicted in the 1880 painting we discovered (previous blogs). I wanted to discover the small lake or pond close to the old farm, and see if I could find a hilltop to photograph the town with the church from a distance. After walking for about six kilometers I gave up. There was no good place to look back and see the town. I did find the small lake.

View Through a Portal

The Temple sessions this week were larger than usual. It was as though even the Temple visitors were coming out of hibernation. There were also three baptismal sessions. A week with baptismal activity is always a memorable week. Especially when one of them is a family baptismal session.

Time to quit while the sun is still shining.