We had heard good things about the Coffee Shop at the hotel we were staying at (Little America) so we went there for breakfast. We should have known the prices would be outrageous, yet they still took us by surprise.
Landon suggested we run, but we stuck it out and were very happy with the food. It ended up being $33 for breakfast, which is actually less than IHOP and gave us way more food.
We took advantage of the free Downtown Trax route and caught a train right by our hotel.
This was a fun first-time experience for the kids, and reminded me of riding the Metro in Paris (but different).
We got off at The Temple Square stop so we could go to the Family History Library. I took this picture of Assembly Hall (a building I love) from the corner and was quite pleased. Have I mentioned that I love tulip season?!
We went to the Family History Library for the first time and felt the Spirit immediately. I was choked up before we'd even made it into the 9 minute orientation video room. There are senior missionaries serving all over the place and they are touchingly nice! They gave us pencils and family history sheets.
The kids got right to work on their family trees.
We spent about an hour on the computers looking up various family members and doing some indexing. I still don't understand it very much, but think this outing sparked an interested that needs to be pursued by myself. We also went to the 3rd floor to deliver some candy and socks to a missionary serving from our ward, but he wasn't there. We left the bag with a note on it but were bummed to have missed him.
We walked next door to the Church History Museum and wandered for awhile. There's some amazing stuff in there, but of course it was a touch too warm and the floors seems a little loose to me so I actually felt a little seasick (weird).
By the time we got out of there we were all hungry and at the point of meltdown...Randy accidentally stepped on Whitney's foot as she was pouting herself away from him and ended up falling on her butt. It was quite the seen! As this lovely domestic incident was happening a street person (there are way too many of them downtown) approached me for money for a "bus ticket". I gave him $3 and had him sign a disclosure document about the family issues he'd witnessed, ha.
Of course, we followed up our family friction with a walk around the grounds of the temple. I wasn't feeling very "families can be together forever" but the grounds were beautiful.
Landon was definitely the good child that day!
We finally staggered across the street to Hagermann's for a very tasty lunch and to have our sense of well-being restored.
Of course, Whitney did not like the plain roast beef sandwich she ordered ($6) so she only ate chips, a cookie and soda. Good Hell!
After lunch the sun came out again both literally and figuratively. We went to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building to see the movie about Joseph Smith. It was very well done and quite spiritual, so we all came out of there in good form and wandered the temple grounds some more.
Here's my favorite photo of the day!!
Next up was a tour of the Beehive House (can you believe we've never done any of these things before?!).
It was cool to see all that historical furniture and clothing, especially this wedding dress that one of Brigham Young's daughters wore...I was that size never! It was seriously tiny, like a size -1 petite!
Afterward we admired the flowers and Whitney pointed out that they appeared to be on steroids.
Upon walking across the street back to City Creek we were passed by Jeffrey R. Holland! I was excited just to have him walk by, but when he was stopped by some people to shake hands we had Landon run over too.
This is the hand that shook the hand of an apostle!! Very cool!
After checking out a few of the shops we caught Trax again and decided to ride it around the rest of the loop to see the city.
This was pretty cool until it stopped in a ghetto-ish part of town and announced it was the "end of the line!" Yikes! We thought perhaps we'd made a huge mistake until I found an employee who informed us we could get back on and it would back the other way in a few minutes...phew! I had visions of trekking across town all night.
Instead we went back to the hotel to swim. It was early evening so we only had another hour of sunlight left and it felt so good lounging on that chair reading. I only got about 4 pages read before the guilt got to me and I joined the family in the pool. We played tag with a kid named Brandon until 9:00. I also sustained a pretty painful raised bruise on my left knee from accidentally slamming it into a protruding underwater filter thing. It hurt terribly then and is painful and ugly now...good times.
Back at the room Landon kicked back with some NBA basketball while Randy went to pick up dinner and Whitney and I got cleaned up from the pool.
We got Rusted Sun Pizza and confirmed what Adam is always telling us...that we're living like animals with no good pizza where we live in the UC (Utah County). This was seriously fantastic pizza, something we'll dream about and yearn for in the future. Ahhh.
The good news is we all slept better the 2nd night and had none of the hilarious banter we'd had the night before. This time we knew what to expect and we were exhausted.
