We inaugurated the month of July by taking a two-week long family reunion trip. On Monday the 2nd of July we checked our miniature poodle Dobie into his “spa” – the kennel at the vet’s – and then hit the road for Farmington NM. The trip was as long as always (7 hours), but it went without event and before bedtime we were relaxing at my folks’ house. On the 3rd we drove over to the neighboring town of Aztec to visit the world class Aztec Ruins, so named because early archeologists thought the ruins must have been built by the Aztecs because they’re so big, but they’re really of Anasazi origin – we hadn’t visited them since Christmas of 1993, so they were pretty new to our girls. Besides the impressive stone work on the outside of the buildings, it was extremely interesting to see the wonderful wood work on the insides, like on the ceilings, and the woven reed hangings that they used for doors (all original – preserved by the ultra-dry climate and the shelter of the ruins themselves.) That evening we enjoyed the Independence Day fireworks even though it was only the 3rd – they were choreographed to music from one of the local radio stations – for some reason they do them a day early there in Farmington. On the 4th, the actual Independence Day holiday, we spent our morning out at the range shooting guns – we shot three .22 rifles, and three pistols: a little .25 Saturday Night Special, a .22, and my Mom’s new .38 revolver. We were pleased to see that Annie, who had never chosen to go out shooting with us before, is a real good shot. And with CJ gone, Kat had the opportunity to have her Grandpa teach her how to clean the guns afterwards. That night we drove up to Durango CO for a little chuckwagon Bar-B-Q dinner and a cowboy concert with the Bar-D Wranglers – they were better than ever (we’ve been going out there since about 1969.) On the drive home we enjoyed the City of Durango’s fireworks bursting right over our heads.
On the 5th of July we hit the road again and drove diagonally across Colorado and Kansas over to Kearney, Nebraska via the back roads and byways – it was all quite scenic and the non-freeway roads didn’t slow us down much – we all agreed that the town of “Punkin” was the funnest named. On this big road trip we broke in our new GPS unit, a Garmin Nüvi 350 ($500 at Best Buy or $350 on-line.) This GPS unit not only calculates the best route and draws you a map of the route, it also calls out the driving directions vocally and allows you to select the languages, and even the regional dialect, that it uses. We considered both male and female accents from America, England, and Australia, as well as Spanish from Spain and South America. We chose the female voice with the Australian accent, named Karen, so now we call our GPS unit “Karen.” Karen did a fine job choosing routes for us after we let her know that we were in fact an automobile rather than a bicycle and were allowed to ride on the freeways. At dusk that night (and others) we drove through a hail storm of bugs, which made it progressively harder to see through the windshield – most interesting were the lightning bugs that continued to glow for a few seconds after splattering into goo on the glass. We made our hotel in Kearney NE just at bedtime.
Bright and early on the 6th we continued our journey east and spent a day visiting Winter Quarters NE and Mt. Pisgah IA. Winter Quarters, now Omaha, is an old Mormon settlement where the Mormon pioneers stayed for two years to regroup after being driven from their homes in the United States, (Nauvoo IL being the last,) while the leaders of the church headed by Brigham Young scouted out the route to the Salt Lake valley. They have a lovely visitor’s center there, which we visited – at one point our little tour group sang “Come Come Ye Saints” (which was written in a camp near there) and took a stroll through the old pioneer cemetery (where about 600 pioneers are buried) next to the beautiful new temple. There in the cemetery is the poignant statue titled “Tragedy at Winter Quarters” of a grieving couple burying their baby – its image has haunted me my whole life and now I’ve seen it in person (that's the photo at the top of this posting.) At Mt. Pisgah IA, which was a way station set halfway between Nauvoo and Winter Quarters, and the first white settlement that far west in Iowa, we found a monument dedicated to the pioneers who lived and died there (about 800 died there according to the monument.) The twenty some odd names of the community leaders inscribed on the white stone monument included that of my ancestor Noah Rogers (my 4th great-grandfather and reportedly the first person to die and be buried at Mt. Pisgah) who was asked to help found that settlement (I personally knew my great-grandma Jack, whose maiden name was Rogers.) I was shocked to see that Noah died at the very young age of 49 – not four years older than I am right now – in the photos that we have of him he looks much older. There was also a wonderful plaque there that quoted the local Indian chief Pied Riche, whose Pottawattamie tribe had been driven from their homeland in Michigan, when he welcomed the Mormon refugees saying: “We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. Because one suffers and does not deserve it is no reason he shall suffer always. We may live to see it right yet. If we do not, our children will.” That night we made it our hotel in Ft. Madison IA, right on the Mississippi River, just at bedtime.
On the morning of the 7th we drove across the Mississippi river from Ft. Madison and spent the day visiting Nauvoo IL, the city that the Mormons built after having been driven from Missouri, when the then Governor Boggs issued an “Extermination Order” (recently rescinded in 1976,) by draining a malarial mosquito infested swamp – ultimately it rivaled Chicago in its day (from 1839-1846.) First thing that morning we visited the visitors’ center – among other exhibits they had very nice area displaying art about the Willie and Martin handcart companies, along with excerpts from the journals of the pioneers in those two companies. One of my ancestor’s journals was quoted there, that of my 3rd great-grandmother Helena Mortensen who was a recent immigrant from Denmark – she was my age when she walked with the Willie Handcart Company nearly 1000 miles from Winter Quarters NE to Salt Lake City UT, starting out a little too late in the year and was caught in a deadly mountain snowstorm in Wyoming that cost 21% of their group their lives. After that, Kat and I spent a couple of hours at the Land and Records office, gathering data on 21 ancestors (including the aforementioned Noah Rogers) who owned land in Nauvoo and made the local papers and other town documents – we burned all those files to CD – I have really had fun reading through all of the documents to rediscover my rich pioneer heritage. We also “discovered” that Jonathan Browning is Leslie’s 4th great grandfather – yes, I mean the famous gun maker (inventor of the repeating rifle, whose son John invented and patented the machine gun still in use by the US Military,) whose company still exists today with its headquarters recently moved from Utah to Belgium – so we made sure to visit his old home and gun factory right there in Nauvoo. After visiting a few other restored homes, printing press, store, school, and blacksmith shop, we drove over to the town of Carthage to see the jail where Joseph Smith and his brother and Hyrum were martyred. I loved the quote inscribed there where Joseph Smith said: “I never feel to force my doctrine upon any person; I rejoice to see prejudice give way to truth, and the traditions of men dispersed by the pure principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” We drove back to Nauvoo that night and strolled around the newly restored temple, looking like it did back when it was built the first time in the 1840’s – it must have been truly awesome to those poor folks out on the frontier. We saw two musical shows in a row that night – one was performed by the senior missionaries and was about life in and the abandonment of Nauvoo, and the other was the big pageant, which was all about the founding, building, and abandonment of Nauvoo. I must say that I enjoyed visiting Nauvoo even more than I anticipated – we needed more than one day to see it all – I guess that just leaves us something to go back for.
On Sunday the 8th, en route to Leslie’s brother’s place in Cleveland OH, we took a small detour to the south and stopped in at Hannibal MO to tour Mark Twain’s boyhood home (after all, Leslie is an English teacher.) While we were there we also visited the homes of his boyhood friends who were the models for Becky Thatcher and Huckleberry Finn, as well as his dad’s office (the town judge) and the local pharmacy. They also had a couple of real nice Mark Twain museum there in town – the best part of the museums were the copious quotes from old Sam Clemens himself, my favorite being: “A man’s experiences of life are a book. There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.” We got to Andy and Lynn’s house at well past bedtime that night, but not much later than everyone else. The next day, on the 9th, we hooked up with Leslie’s whole family, all five siblings, Meredith, Matt, Andy, and Paul, and all of their families (26 people all together), and went to the nearby town of Kirtland (an early Mormon settlement from 1831 to 1838) and the outlying Johnson Farm and saw where the prophet Joseph Smith lived and worked while in the Kirtland area (before the Mormons were driven out to Missouri, and from thence to Nauvoo.) We also toured the Kirtland temple, the first temple built by the Mormons but no longer owned by the LDS Church – our group was invited by our guide to sing the hymn “The Spirit of God” (originally written for the occasion of the temple dedication back in 1836) – Meredith accompanied us on the piano. While there in historical Kirtland I spent an hour or so going through the records office, gathering a stack of papers and a couple of CDs of info on a dozen ancestors who lived there (including Noah Rogers, again.)
On the 5th of July we hit the road again and drove diagonally across Colorado and Kansas over to Kearney, Nebraska via the back roads and byways – it was all quite scenic and the non-freeway roads didn’t slow us down much – we all agreed that the town of “Punkin” was the funnest named. On this big road trip we broke in our new GPS unit, a Garmin Nüvi 350 ($500 at Best Buy or $350 on-line.) This GPS unit not only calculates the best route and draws you a map of the route, it also calls out the driving directions vocally and allows you to select the languages, and even the regional dialect, that it uses. We considered both male and female accents from America, England, and Australia, as well as Spanish from Spain and South America. We chose the female voice with the Australian accent, named Karen, so now we call our GPS unit “Karen.” Karen did a fine job choosing routes for us after we let her know that we were in fact an automobile rather than a bicycle and were allowed to ride on the freeways. At dusk that night (and others) we drove through a hail storm of bugs, which made it progressively harder to see through the windshield – most interesting were the lightning bugs that continued to glow for a few seconds after splattering into goo on the glass. We made our hotel in Kearney NE just at bedtime.
Bright and early on the 6th we continued our journey east and spent a day visiting Winter Quarters NE and Mt. Pisgah IA. Winter Quarters, now Omaha, is an old Mormon settlement where the Mormon pioneers stayed for two years to regroup after being driven from their homes in the United States, (Nauvoo IL being the last,) while the leaders of the church headed by Brigham Young scouted out the route to the Salt Lake valley. They have a lovely visitor’s center there, which we visited – at one point our little tour group sang “Come Come Ye Saints” (which was written in a camp near there) and took a stroll through the old pioneer cemetery (where about 600 pioneers are buried) next to the beautiful new temple. There in the cemetery is the poignant statue titled “Tragedy at Winter Quarters” of a grieving couple burying their baby – its image has haunted me my whole life and now I’ve seen it in person (that's the photo at the top of this posting.) At Mt. Pisgah IA, which was a way station set halfway between Nauvoo and Winter Quarters, and the first white settlement that far west in Iowa, we found a monument dedicated to the pioneers who lived and died there (about 800 died there according to the monument.) The twenty some odd names of the community leaders inscribed on the white stone monument included that of my ancestor Noah Rogers (my 4th great-grandfather and reportedly the first person to die and be buried at Mt. Pisgah) who was asked to help found that settlement (I personally knew my great-grandma Jack, whose maiden name was Rogers.) I was shocked to see that Noah died at the very young age of 49 – not four years older than I am right now – in the photos that we have of him he looks much older. There was also a wonderful plaque there that quoted the local Indian chief Pied Riche, whose Pottawattamie tribe had been driven from their homeland in Michigan, when he welcomed the Mormon refugees saying: “We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. Because one suffers and does not deserve it is no reason he shall suffer always. We may live to see it right yet. If we do not, our children will.” That night we made it our hotel in Ft. Madison IA, right on the Mississippi River, just at bedtime.
On the morning of the 7th we drove across the Mississippi river from Ft. Madison and spent the day visiting Nauvoo IL, the city that the Mormons built after having been driven from Missouri, when the then Governor Boggs issued an “Extermination Order” (recently rescinded in 1976,) by draining a malarial mosquito infested swamp – ultimately it rivaled Chicago in its day (from 1839-1846.) First thing that morning we visited the visitors’ center – among other exhibits they had very nice area displaying art about the Willie and Martin handcart companies, along with excerpts from the journals of the pioneers in those two companies. One of my ancestor’s journals was quoted there, that of my 3rd great-grandmother Helena Mortensen who was a recent immigrant from Denmark – she was my age when she walked with the Willie Handcart Company nearly 1000 miles from Winter Quarters NE to Salt Lake City UT, starting out a little too late in the year and was caught in a deadly mountain snowstorm in Wyoming that cost 21% of their group their lives. After that, Kat and I spent a couple of hours at the Land and Records office, gathering data on 21 ancestors (including the aforementioned Noah Rogers) who owned land in Nauvoo and made the local papers and other town documents – we burned all those files to CD – I have really had fun reading through all of the documents to rediscover my rich pioneer heritage. We also “discovered” that Jonathan Browning is Leslie’s 4th great grandfather – yes, I mean the famous gun maker (inventor of the repeating rifle, whose son John invented and patented the machine gun still in use by the US Military,) whose company still exists today with its headquarters recently moved from Utah to Belgium – so we made sure to visit his old home and gun factory right there in Nauvoo. After visiting a few other restored homes, printing press, store, school, and blacksmith shop, we drove over to the town of Carthage to see the jail where Joseph Smith and his brother and Hyrum were martyred. I loved the quote inscribed there where Joseph Smith said: “I never feel to force my doctrine upon any person; I rejoice to see prejudice give way to truth, and the traditions of men dispersed by the pure principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” We drove back to Nauvoo that night and strolled around the newly restored temple, looking like it did back when it was built the first time in the 1840’s – it must have been truly awesome to those poor folks out on the frontier. We saw two musical shows in a row that night – one was performed by the senior missionaries and was about life in and the abandonment of Nauvoo, and the other was the big pageant, which was all about the founding, building, and abandonment of Nauvoo. I must say that I enjoyed visiting Nauvoo even more than I anticipated – we needed more than one day to see it all – I guess that just leaves us something to go back for.
On Sunday the 8th, en route to Leslie’s brother’s place in Cleveland OH, we took a small detour to the south and stopped in at Hannibal MO to tour Mark Twain’s boyhood home (after all, Leslie is an English teacher.) While we were there we also visited the homes of his boyhood friends who were the models for Becky Thatcher and Huckleberry Finn, as well as his dad’s office (the town judge) and the local pharmacy. They also had a couple of real nice Mark Twain museum there in town – the best part of the museums were the copious quotes from old Sam Clemens himself, my favorite being: “A man’s experiences of life are a book. There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.” We got to Andy and Lynn’s house at well past bedtime that night, but not much later than everyone else. The next day, on the 9th, we hooked up with Leslie’s whole family, all five siblings, Meredith, Matt, Andy, and Paul, and all of their families (26 people all together), and went to the nearby town of Kirtland (an early Mormon settlement from 1831 to 1838) and the outlying Johnson Farm and saw where the prophet Joseph Smith lived and worked while in the Kirtland area (before the Mormons were driven out to Missouri, and from thence to Nauvoo.) We also toured the Kirtland temple, the first temple built by the Mormons but no longer owned by the LDS Church – our group was invited by our guide to sing the hymn “The Spirit of God” (originally written for the occasion of the temple dedication back in 1836) – Meredith accompanied us on the piano. While there in historical Kirtland I spent an hour or so going through the records office, gathering a stack of papers and a couple of CDs of info on a dozen ancestors who lived there (including Noah Rogers, again.)
On the 10th we drove over to Cedar Point – “The Roller Coaster Capital of the World” – and spent a wild day on those roller coasters (I agree that they were by far the best I’ve ever ridden.) Before we went into the park, Leslie and I asked one of the park employees which of the roller coasters were the best – he directed us to the top three: Maverick (which boasts a 105 foot drop at a 95-degree angle down to only 5 feet above the ground, all at 70 miles per hour), Top Thrill Dragster (which zooms at 120mph before rocketing straight up 420 feet before rolling over and then free falling 400 feet back to earth), and the Millennium Force (that rips at over 90mph up and then free falls off hills of 310, 169, and 182 feet.) They were, without a doubt the very best roller coasters that I’ve ever been on, by a factor of five – no kidding. The next day, on the 11th, we spent the day recuperating at Andy’s, catching our breath, doing laundry, getting the oil changed in the car, and swapping CDs of family history and DVDs of old family movies (thanks Paul for the old movies.) That afternoon, Les, Annie, cousin Ben, and I ran over to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame there in Cleveland for a couple of hours – we really needed at least two more hours to see it all. It was built in a big glass pyramid with each floor getting progressively smaller – the last exhibit up in tip of the museum featured Jim Morrison and The Doors – I’m guessing the curator is a fan. That night we (the teenagers and their parents) went to see the new Harry Potter movie (#5 – “The Order of the Phoenix”) – there were no long lines and we didn’t have any problem getting seats, so apparently Cleveland wasn’t caught up in the whole Potter-mania (here in St. George they were forming lines three days before the theaters opened.)
Then, on Thursday the 12th, we hit the road again and caravanned up to Niagara Falls – we stayed in a fancy hotel on the Canadian side with a lovely view of the Horseshoe Falls. That afternoon we took a ride on the Maid of the Mist (with the blue plastic ponchos and everything) right up to the falls. Then we took a little hike over on the American side, to the “Cave of the Winds” which is no longer a cave, really just a short hike to the base of the falls. Having done it once now, we’d recommend spending a day doing the attractions on the American side before heading over to the Canadian side to sleep; on the American side you can buy a pass that gets you into five exciting attractions plus a shuttle bus ride for only $28 (including the Maid of the Mist ride and the Cave of the Winds hike) vs. the pass available on the Canadian side that gives you a four-for-one pass for $49, but only one and one half of the attractions that are worth seeing. Oh well – next time. The next day, on Friday the 13th, we drove from Niagara over to Palmyra NY where we visited Joseph Smith’s family home and farm where he lived as a boy at the time he was called to be a prophet. As a family we took a walk through the Sacred Grove where Joseph had his first vision, pausing to have Meredith give us a brief devotional and then we sang “Oh How Lovely Was the Morning.” We took a brief tour through the home where Joseph and his family lived while he was translating the gold plates into the Book of Mormon; in the last room I spotted a box on a dresser in the corner that I recognized and asked the guide if that was the box where Joseph had kept the plates and she told me that it was a replica – I’ve seen the real box, back in 1980 when Eldred G. Smith, the last church patriarch in the Smith line, came and spoke to us at the Institute of Religion at the University of Arizona and brought with him a bunch of Smith family heirlooms (including that box - the real one - and the clothes that Hyrum was wearing when he killed at Carthage.) Then we drove past the new temple there (pausing briefly to take photos – let me know if you want to see them all – there are 300 and I’ve posted them on the internet) and then drove a short ways over to the Hill Cumorah, where Joseph Smith recovered the golden plates from which was translated the Book of Mormon. Visiting Palmyra NY was a really special capstone to our whole trek – ending where it all started back in 1820. Then, that weekend, on the 14th and 15th, we made a two-day 30-hour 2,000 mile marathon drive home – arriving safe and sound. All told we drove an even 5,280 miles on this road trip. Whew! All during the long drive there and back again we entertained ourselves by listing to the Harry Potter books on tape/CD – even with all of our many hours driving we only had time to listen to books 1, 2, 5, and 6. The next morning we collected Dobie from the vet’s – he’d taken advantage of his two weeks at the spa and lost a couple of pounds, which was four more than me.
Then, on Thursday the 12th, we hit the road again and caravanned up to Niagara Falls – we stayed in a fancy hotel on the Canadian side with a lovely view of the Horseshoe Falls. That afternoon we took a ride on the Maid of the Mist (with the blue plastic ponchos and everything) right up to the falls. Then we took a little hike over on the American side, to the “Cave of the Winds” which is no longer a cave, really just a short hike to the base of the falls. Having done it once now, we’d recommend spending a day doing the attractions on the American side before heading over to the Canadian side to sleep; on the American side you can buy a pass that gets you into five exciting attractions plus a shuttle bus ride for only $28 (including the Maid of the Mist ride and the Cave of the Winds hike) vs. the pass available on the Canadian side that gives you a four-for-one pass for $49, but only one and one half of the attractions that are worth seeing. Oh well – next time. The next day, on Friday the 13th, we drove from Niagara over to Palmyra NY where we visited Joseph Smith’s family home and farm where he lived as a boy at the time he was called to be a prophet. As a family we took a walk through the Sacred Grove where Joseph had his first vision, pausing to have Meredith give us a brief devotional and then we sang “Oh How Lovely Was the Morning.” We took a brief tour through the home where Joseph and his family lived while he was translating the gold plates into the Book of Mormon; in the last room I spotted a box on a dresser in the corner that I recognized and asked the guide if that was the box where Joseph had kept the plates and she told me that it was a replica – I’ve seen the real box, back in 1980 when Eldred G. Smith, the last church patriarch in the Smith line, came and spoke to us at the Institute of Religion at the University of Arizona and brought with him a bunch of Smith family heirlooms (including that box - the real one - and the clothes that Hyrum was wearing when he killed at Carthage.) Then we drove past the new temple there (pausing briefly to take photos – let me know if you want to see them all – there are 300 and I’ve posted them on the internet) and then drove a short ways over to the Hill Cumorah, where Joseph Smith recovered the golden plates from which was translated the Book of Mormon. Visiting Palmyra NY was a really special capstone to our whole trek – ending where it all started back in 1820. Then, that weekend, on the 14th and 15th, we made a two-day 30-hour 2,000 mile marathon drive home – arriving safe and sound. All told we drove an even 5,280 miles on this road trip. Whew! All during the long drive there and back again we entertained ourselves by listing to the Harry Potter books on tape/CD – even with all of our many hours driving we only had time to listen to books 1, 2, 5, and 6. The next morning we collected Dobie from the vet’s – he’d taken advantage of his two weeks at the spa and lost a couple of pounds, which was four more than me.
