Nauvoo Family Vacation

My family decided to take a vacation together this year and what better place to visit than Nauvoo! It's only a six hour drive and fortunately our kids are old enough that it's not too painful to travel with them. We had a wonderful time seeing all of the sites (including Carthage). Well, I can't quite say "wonderful". It really was hard to hear all of the hardships the saints went through and to actually be in the room where the Prophet Joseph Smith was martyred.

One thing that WAS really neat was my parents renting a house for us to stay in. This would be my dad and my brother hanging out on the porch:

And this would be the view from said porch:


Pretty nice, eh? We thought so!
The trip was filled with lots and lots of things to do. Now, I'm not trying to be a theater snob, but some of the productions were LAME!!!!!! At least they were free, right? One of them was really strange. I swear some lady from Utah that was the stake road show coordinator wrote this musical. It was about this girl having to choose between two guys that she liked set during the time of Old Nauvoo. They danced and sang during the good times of Nauvoo, and then mourned during the time of Joseph's death. Then, very oddly, they broke out in jubilant song and dance again because they were moving west! Yee Haw!

What made this oh-so-strange was that we had just gone on a carriage ride tour of historical Nauvoo. At one point we actually went down the "Trail of Tears" now called the "Trail of Hope". Anyway, while we passed this part of the tour, the tour guide told us a little of what happened that day. The saints were given a 4 hour notice to leave Nauvoo. It was -30 degrees. We all were told to turn around and look at the beautiful temple that they all had sacrificed to build, and to realize that they never saw it again. I'm sorry, but you can re-name it "Trail of Hope" all you want, but I still don't believe the saints were THAT jubilant when they were packing up to head west. We were slightly weirded out.

Here are the kids at the visitor's center:


Playing Pioneer games before the pageant (which, by the way, there were NINE adults in the house when we were trying to figure out how to spell "pageant" and only ONE knew how to spell it correctly -- Shane. He was also the only one who recieved his primary education outside of KY. Thank you Oregon Public School Systems!)




The whole family outside of the Nauvoo Temple: (minus Guy and Rebecca)

The best picture in the world of my parents with all of the grandkids. Priceless, no?


We had a wonderful time and the kids loved being with their cousins so much. My favorite part was the pageant (spelled correctly after a google search). I would even go so far as to say that it was better than the Palmyra pageant. But that's just me.

And, for your pleasure, I thought I'd add one more thing. You see, we do lots of really neat things as a family and we take lots of pictures to document those really neat things. However, I am usually the one holding the camera. My thinking is this: If I were to die today, what pictures would there be for the kids to remember me by? What would you put in those sappy memorial slideshows at my funeral? Pictures from high school? Get outta here! So I explained all of this to Shane and asked him if he could please make sure that it was recorded for all of my posterity to know that I, Ollie, went on this vacation. All I have to say is this -- Job well done honey.