Difficult Goodbyes and Wonderful Hellos

On Monday morning, we went exploring for our morning walk.

We are always amazed at the magical, storybook look of some of the things we see.

 We passed a construction site with these painted pictures decorating the wall around it.

 We thought that this was an interesting house.

 This time we saw leaves with white spots.

 This was another interesting old house.

 Look at this old ladder on the roof of the house.

We continued our training with Elder and Sister Perkins.

Monday evening, we got together with the temple missionaries at the Lewis's apartment to say goodbye.

Oh how we will miss these wonderful couples!

We ended the evening by singing "God Be With You Til We Meet Again" 

with some singing in English and some in Finnish. It was very touching!

On Tuesday, Elder Shurtz was helping Elder and Sister Jämsä get Elder Jämsä's residency permit application filed.

 Sister Jämsä was so frustrated because everytime she would attach the requested documents, 

they would show up, but then disappear when she went on, 

and they weren't there if she went back to check to make sure that they were still attached.

Elder Shurtz told her that he thought she should just go ahead and submit it.

When she did, it showed the list of the attachments, and it had multiples of all of them. 

Apparently it had saved them each time that she had attached them.

We are praying that all will go well and that they will be able to get their residency permits.

On Tuesday evening all of us from the office went to the Lehtinen's house for another farewell dinner.

We love being at the Lehtinen's lovely home. The weather was perfect for an outdoors event.

 The food was delicious!

Elder Lehtinen had used his smoker to cook the fish and he had made his delicious bread.

 

President Aura told us some scripture references that he said were reminiscent of us. 

It was all very touching and complimentary.

Elder and Sister Jämsä performed a couple of beautiful musical pieces.

President and Sister Aura had to leave, but the rest of us went inside for a delicious dessert and a game. 

 

Elder Shurtz and Elder Perkins discovered that they had matching suits.

 

They were the same brand, 

but when we took a picture up close, 

we could see a slight difference in the color.

Of course we had to get a picture with the Lehtinens. 

We love this couple so much and are so grateful to have such dear friends. 

We feel so connected and close to them, and are so grateful that our paths in life have intersected!

She presented me with some beautiful knitted socks, and a lovely note from her family members.

On Wednesday, it was time to say goodbye to Sister Saarnivaara.

We have come to love her, even though we have only known her for a couple of months. 

She has been a great help at the office, and we are so grateful for her willingness to serve there.

 We also had to say goodbye to the Assistants, Elder Fitzpatrick and Elder Krause.

They are great missionaries, and we have enjoyed working with them.

 We went to the temple for one last time.

We are really going to miss this beautiful temple!

 On Wednesday night, we finished reading the Book of Mormon in Finnish.

We have been reading it faithfully each night, with the goal to finish it by the time we ended our mission.

We would take turns reading out loud one phrase at a time, with the other person reading the English.

It was a slow process, but we could recognize many words and phrases by the time we were finished.

It has been a good experience to work on this together.

On Thursday, Sister Airto came to the office to say goodbye.

We enjoyed working with her and hearing her stories. 

I asked her to retell us the story of when she toasted someone with water instead of vodka, 

and later found out that it was Khrushchev, and she could have lost her job and been sent away.

It was so fun to be with her again! 

We were sad that we would not be there for her 80th birthday celebration. 

Her birthday is the same day that we traveled home.

Thursday evening there was a Relief Society end of summer social at the Lehtinen's house. 

Sister Perkins and I went to that.

There was delicious food and nice company.

It was another lovely evening and beautiful weather.

 They took pictures of everyone with a poloroid camera and put them on the front of a card 

and then everyone wrote a little kind note in each card. 

I'm so glad that I was able to be to this event.

Friday brought a couple more farewells.

I knew that Sister Laitinen was going to come to the office at 2:00 and we were going to have treats.

Sister Perkins went to the store and bought all sorts of things for us to eat. 

The Jämsäs and the Lehtinens also came.

It was so nice to be able to spend a little bit of time with these wonderful people.

It was so hard to say goodbye!

We stopped by the temple to pick up the name slips from the last time we were there.

I took some pictures while Elder Shurtz went inside.

We had our departure dinner with President and Sister Aura.

 We had a delicious dinner!

 We had pulla and licorice icecream for dessert.

I had never bought any licorice icecream because I didn't think I would like it, but it was actually quite good!

 

We hated to leave the mission home, but we had to get back to our hotel and do our last minute packing.

We had to get up really early to be ready to go by 4:30a.m.

We were ready to go, when we realized that we were missing one of the room keys.

We searched, and unpacked some trying to find it but finally decided we just needed to go.

Elder Shurtz picked up the suitcase and everything fell out because is was unzipped. 

We hurried and threw everything back in. 

When we checked out, we told them about the lost key and they just said no problem.

We drove the van and picked up the Perkins. Elder Perkins then drove us to the airport.

We got checked in for our flight and got our luggage dropped off.

President Aura came to see us off.

While we were on the plane, I finally had a chance to open the cards from Sister Laitinen.

She had written instructions for me on how to knit socks!

I was so touched that she would go to the trouble to do that. 

Hopefully this will allow me to be able to knit some socks without having her there to tutor me each step of the way.

Our flights went quite smoothly. We made our connection with no problems and finally we were in Utah.

I hated looking out the window as we got close and saw that there were no trees and mostly brown, very little green.

It made me sad, and miss Finland.

We made it through passport control and then got our luggage. 

I saw a MarcoPolo from Amy showing that they were at the airport. 

It made me anxious to get out to see everyone.

We made it through customs with no problems and headed out to the lobby.

As we walked out, we could see Richard and Kyler.

Apparently everyone else was in Terminal 2 because that is where it said the flight was arriving.

Soon everyone was there!

Sunday was the blessing day for little Susan.

Here she is for her two grandmas who she is named after (Susan Jane).

The sun rose in Provo at 6:54 am and it set at 7:58 pm, for 13:04 hours of daylight.

In Espoo the sun rose at 6:14 am and it set at 8:26 pm, for 14:11 hours of daylight.