After taking the kids on a quick hike to the Ledges at Cuyahoga National Park in the morning, we headed straight to the Cleveland airport to pick up Branson who we flew home for a few days to attend Engineering camp at Utah State.
We had missed him and were excited to have him back with us for the remainder of our family trip. Poor guy had a red eye flight, so he was pretty tired most of the day, but was a trooper and still came with us to all the different sites, even though I’m sure he would have rather been sleeping. 😴
We started at the Kirtland temple which is owned by the Community of Christ church. We really lucked out because we hadn’t made a reservation beforehand and they had a big bus group ahead of us, but a kind worker named Dave offered to give us a personal tour and he just reversed the order of our tour so as not to conflict with the other one. But he was fantastic!
Dave had been born in Kirkland and lived just down the street from the temple most of his life, and had even attended church there so he knew all about it! He had so many great stories to share, and we really enjoyed our time with him. He showed us the upper floor which I hadn’t gotten to see the first time I had been there, as well as the original rock inside a wall.
He pointed out some design flaws, such as a window that was partly covered by stairs, and then finished the tour in the room where it was said That Jesus Christ, Moses, Elias, and Elijah had appeared. It was incredible to think about.
We also got to see a replica of Emm Smiths hymnal she put together. It was so tiny and smaller then my hand! We ended the tour by watching a movie about the temple in the visitors center.
We then headed over to historic Kirtland where missionaries from our own church gave us a guided tour of the Whitney’s home, Newell K. Whitney store, ashery, and sawmill.
Our favorite part was sitting in a small room in the Whitney store which was set aside as a classroom called the “school of the prophets. There the two missionaries giving the tour shared how Joseph had promised if the men in the room would soften their hearts that Christ would manifest himself to them. They then shared 3 of the mens journal entries who had written about their experience seeing Christ. There was such a strong spirit.
We then had a little scare when we realized that Jamis, who had borrowed my jacket in a cold air conditioned room, had lost our car keys which I had carefully zipped up in my jacket pocket. 😬 Jamis apparently had gotten bored at some point and took the keys out of my pocket to play with them and set them down somewhere on our tour!
This led us to retrace our steps and ask several missionaries to reopen some of the buildings to search them, but thankfully Jamis thought he remembered where he put them and they were exactly where he thought! Whew! We made sure and said a prayer of gratitude! 🙏
Adam then took us out for lunch at a fun BBQ place before we drove 4.5 hours to our next place in Southbend, Indiana. We had dinner at a Mexican place in Southbend and then Adam went to see Notre Dame and “touchdown Jesus” while the kids and I got laundry
started, and bags brought in. He was thrilled when he got there and a Billy Joel concert was going on. 😂
We ended up staying at a brand new property listed on Airbnb and we’re impressed with how cute the owners had made the home. We were also were so grateful to finally have a washer and dryer so we could do some much needed laundry. We were all running short on undies! 😂
