Our, (Len & Phyl's) UK trip in November took us up the eastern side of the country. It was good to meet up with our friends in Basildon. David and Christine Barnes had arranged a reunion for those who have come to Haus Barnabas for the Pitsea Family Holidays in recent years. Richard and Michelle whose conversion dates back to a week in Haus Barnabas in 2009, cooked us all a roast dinner.
It's so encouraging to see this couple growing in the Christian faith and to hear how God has been working in their family and particularly in their oldest son Ricky. David McCann who with his wife Liz have led the Bible programmes during the holidays, came up from Southampton and organised a number of activities for us. We also were able to talk with several who were expressing interest in coming to HB in 2014! On the Sunday Len preached at Fryerns Baptist Church in the morning and gave a report of Haus Barnabas at Kingswood Baptist Church in the evening. We spent two very comfortable nights in our campervan in the Kingswood Church car park by kind permission.
During the following week we enjoyed visiting and catching up wtih friends in Cambridge and Norwich before arriving in Durham on Thursday evening. It was very interesting to revisit Ripon on our journey north and to drive by our old haunts of thirty years ago!
We were wonderfully entertained in Durham and Phyl's birthday on the Friday was celebrated in style with a meal out in the evening. On Saturday we motored down to Otley in Yorkshire for our 'Northern Reunion'. This is the fifth year we have held this and was the best attended ever with a large contingent from the Yorkshire Christian Ramblers Association and friends from the Yorkshire Dales in the north, and from Derbyshire further south. We are pleased to have an enthusiastic organiser from the Ramblers Association promoting holidays with so much interest for a 2014 holiday that we are already needing extra accommodation outside the house.
On Sunday morning Len preached at Langley Park Baptist Church, Durham and it was good to renew fellowship with our friends there, several of whom have holidayed with us in past years.
We made a number of calls on our way back south including a brief visit to a longstanding friend in Braintree who was delighted to show us how her grandchildren had grown. The campervan enables us to be independant. We can as necessary overnight in motorway stops or secure parking places, cook ourselves a simple meal on the two burner gas stove, deal with any emails needing attention and sleep comfortably in our double bed with its memory mattress. Although very compact it's real luxury camping, even in winter with a heater blowing hot air around and a boiler for hot water.
Our next call was Horley, near Gatwick airport, where we had our first home and our two sons were born. It was wonderful to visit another longstanding friend who had been a young teenager in our youth club there in the early 1970s, going on with the Lord and now Church secretary in Horley Baptist Church.
So back to our UK base with our kind friends in Ashford where I'm allowed to use the dining room as an office and we could spend many hours printing and stapling our 2013 news report to get into the post before we returned to Germany.
To read the annual news report you can find it via the following link to our website.
If you are looking for houses go check out this good agency that sells houses in Croatia. Houses are located by the sea in variety of Croatian cities. - terra dalmatica
ReplyDelete