Just Say No

Just up the road from the Newell K. Whitney store is the Kirtland temple. We didn't have a ton of time, since we wanted to get to Niagara Falls before dinner time, so we just stopped by and let Zoe run a few laps around the temple yard. The Community of Christ does tours of the building's interior, and maybe we should have gone inside, but we just wanted to get back on the road.

Our April road trip was pretty cool, in that we didn't really have an ultimate destination. It was sort of a jaunt around the Eastern midwest with stop-offs at many places of interest. Because of that, we really didn't want to spend a whole lot of time in any single place. This made it really hard to visit these church sites to the full extent that the missionaries therein had pre-planned for us. We only wanted to look around, maybe rehear a few familiar stories about what happened at the spots we're standing in, take some pictures and move on. These cute little old missionaries have visitors centers full of information for us to absorb, and at least an hour's worth of movies for us to watch, and it is so hard to say no to them. But how does a good Mormon say, "no thanks, we'd like to have a life-changing spiritual moment, but we don't want to miss the three o'clock tour at Spam World"? I guess whether we watch the movie or not, we now have the right to raise our hands during Sunday School and say that we've been there.

I like the picture at the top there, Sara looks pretty hot, and it's sort of like a "Where's Waldo" scene with Zoe hidden away somewhere. Props to the 1830's Mormons for building a pretty building like this one. I remember hearing that the women of the time crushed up their fancy china into the stucco to make it shiny. I would have fought tooth and nail to get that job when the temple building assignments were getting handed out. They should have put that in the movie, or had a china breaking booth at the visitors center.