Trippin'

This has been an AWESOME summer in the family trips category! The trip to Thailand would have been enough to justify the previous sentence all by itself. But there's more! The first week of August we drove from Utah to Virginia where we'll be living for this school year while Quinn does a Tax LLM at Georgetown. If you've never driven from Utah to the East coast, it's a pretty cool drive! We stopped in Nauvoo on the way, and even though we only had a couple of hours it was SO neat to be there!



Once we got settled in a bit, we did some sight seeing around this AMAZING place they call our nation's capital. I LOVE it out here. We walked around (some of) the monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial.

And the World War II Memorial, which we'd never been to and was really neat.


We also went to the National Zoo, which is free! How cool is that? And we had really good luck too! It seemed like everywhere we walked they just happened to be bringing those animals out to feed them, etc. So we got to see a ton of beautiful animals instead of how it is sometimes when you go to the zoo and the animals seem to all be sleeping or hiding and you don't see hardly anything. I couldn't get over how beautiful all the animals seemed to me -- so majestic and graceful. I dressed Caitlyn in her zebra outfit that our friends the Lais gave her, so we got a picture of her with the zebras in the background. (Only you can't actually see the zebras in the background very well. Oh well.)


Then, the week before Quinn's orientation for school started, he packed us up for a spontaneous three-day trip to Palmyra. Um, it was A-MAZING! Which is funny to say because get this: the first night we arrived at our campground right on Seneca Lake (one of the Finger Lakes) and got our campsite all set up and went to bed...only to be awakened at midnight by a thunder and lightning storm! So after an hour or so of trying to sleep through that, Quinn and I both suddenly noticed that our sleeping bags were starting to feel a little wet. Upon some investigation we found that, sure enough, it was raining so hard that water had seeped through the part of our tent not covered by the rain cover and all our bedding was soaked! So when the rain let up for a minute we made a total break for it, threw everything in the car, and drove the remaining hour to Palmyra. By the time we got there it was almost 4am and to our surprise there were only two motels or hotels or anything like unto that anywhere near the city of Palmyra. When we had no luck getting someone to come to the door at either place, we finally drove around til we found the Palmyra Temple (beautiful!), found there was a Stake Center across the street from it, and slept in our car in the parking lot for three hours until we woke up at 7am (so uncomfortable wedged in our seats between all the camping gear that we couldn't sleep any longer than our utter exhaustion had allowed us to).
"So...why was your trip A-MAZING again?" you may be thinking. I will tell you. Instead of turning around and driving home when we woke up at 7am with no feeling in our legs, we decided we were going to stick this out and make it a good trip, dang it! So we called the two motels and one of them was so nice he took pity on us and said we could come right then, at 7am, and he wouldn't even charge us an early arrival fee! Bless his soul! So we went to the motel, showered (hallelujah!) and took a nap for an hour until Caitlyn (who had slept peacefully and comfortably in her car seat) decided she was ready to go. :) And off we went! (p.s. patronize the Scottish Inns if you ever go to Palmyra.)
We went to the Sacred Grove first. I don't remember there being a little white visitors center, but there's one there now. A sweet sister missionary took us on a tour of the Smith family log cabin.

And the frame home they built and moved into just down the road.


Different things stood out to me this time then when I went when I was 18. Afterward, Caitlyn and Quinn and I went into Sacred Grove. Something about being there with my husband and precious little girl made my feelings stronger and more tender. It has never meant more to me then it did right then to know that we were standing in the very grove where our loving Heavenly Father and His Son came to begin the process of putting back on this earth the power and authority that will allow me to be with Quinn and Caitlyn forever and ever, no matter what happens to us in this life.

We walked around the Sacred Grove for quite a while. Then we went just down the street to the Palmyra Temple, which is beautiful.


Next we went to the Peter Whitmer farm, about a half hour away in Fayette. The wife of a senior missionary couple took us around the visitors center and then on a tour of the Peter Whitmer home. She was so sweet! That was a neat visit too. After the tour we asked her if she knew of any Amish restaurants or bakeries. We'd been keeping our eyes out but hadn't seen anything. She told us where to find one nearby and off we went. It was so cool! It was a Mennonite grocery store and at the deli you could get 8 inch long sandwiches with homemade bread for like $3.50. I also left with a sack full of homemade mennonite treats, like chocolates, caramel apple fudge (though I'll never know how that tasted because we decided to give it to the motel manager for being so nice to us), and pastries. Yummmmmm! (Why yes, I did gain several pounds! Thank you for asking!)

After lunch we went to the Hill Cumorah. Again, the sister missionary who took us around the visitors center was so sweet.

Then we walked up to the angel Moroni monument at the top of the hill.


(Apparently, Caitlyn is raising a triumphant fist in the air for making it to the top.)
There were two men up there with an unmistakable Australian accent so I asked where they were from. It turned out they were from Australia but had lived in New Zealand so we had fun talking about all the places I'd served on my mission. AND, it turned out Quinn knew one of the brothers from BYU-Hawaii! Small world, huh?

Last we went to the Grandin Press, the building where the Book of Mormon was first printed. I guess I didn't get any pictures here, but trust me, it was SO neat! We'd saved that for last in case we ran out of time because we didn't think it would be that cool, but it was AWESOME. I can't really explain why it was so neat. You'll just have to go I guess.

The next morning we loaded up and headed out. But on the way home we decided to take a small detour into Amish Country Pennsylvania. We made reservations at a family style Amish restaurant called Plain and Fancy. It was pricey and turned out to be basically like any other restaurant, nothing like the authentic Amish experience we had imagined. We were disappointed but decided to take a drive through the town. We happened to turn down a road just to turn around, but saw a huge gathering of Amish people at a park at the end of the road and decided to check it out!
It turned out to be a gathering they have just once a year and we happened to be there! We bought some shoo-fly pie (ok now my mouth is watering) and icecream and watched the hundreds of youth play volleyball on nets around the field. It was pretty darn cool. We didn't take pictures because we thought that would be rude, but we did get a couple of pictures while we were driving.




Ok, so this has turned into the longest post known to man. But anyway, we had a GREAT summer. When I was growing up, my family went on a big family vacation every summer (in addition to lots of smaller camping trips and other excursions) and I still remember how much I loved our family planning sessions where we would all sit down together in the dining room and decide where we wanted to go that summer and what we wanted to do. It made me feel so special and important that my parents involved us and valued our input. I want to continue that tradition with my family and I'm so glad Quinn loves family trips just as much as I do if not more!