The Final Stretch

By Saturday, we were on the way home. Just two days of driving, and one fun stop each day. This is what our kids look like when we turn on a movie. It's a big help for all the long drives. I surprised them with Big Hero 6 this trip, which is one of the few movies that Peanut actually likes.  And it did captivate him for all 102 minutes.

 

 Saturday, we spent a few hours at Gettysburg, PA. And we quickly learned that Gettysburg really deserves at least a couple days to see it all, but at least we were able to wet our pallet. Someday, we'll go back to explore the rest.

  

First, we explored the museum, which is really well done.

 And then, we looked at the map and decided that the minimum suggestion of spending 3 hours to drive the route of memorials and key battle spots was going to have to be edited because it was already getting late and we had another hour of driving to do that night. It was all so much bigger than we realized. I pictured a big empty field and a small visitors center, not miles and miles, stories and monuments. 

But we did want to see the cemetery.

 

 

It's sobering to think of how many people died in that war, and how many were never even identified.

 

The canons are everywhere. No forgetting what happened in this place.

 Silence isn't very common with this bunch.

Boys were getting tired. It had been a long day, long trip, long history lesson.

 We did do a short little drive on our way out of town.

 We had to stop at the North Carolina monument.

 Sometimes it is hard to remember that NC was part of the Confederacy.

 This field is more what I thought Gettysburg would be--vast emptiness.

 More canons. The roads are lined with them.

 

It's a beautiful area and would be a great place to spend a long weekend.

And then, we just had one last stop on our final drive home. Friends had recommended Luray Caverns as a good driving break on our way home, and even though Daddy-o and I both kind of wanted to just be done and go home, we decided that they looked too amazing to pass up.

Once we got through the long line and made it inside, we were so glad that we did stop. The caves are absolutely beautiful, and huge! I can't believe that we'd never heard of these. Seems like something more people would talk about.

 This reflecting pool, the biggest in the caverns, was incredible.

 It makes the stalagtites look even more impressive than they do just hanging from the ceiling.

 There were so many different types of formations.

 Nature is fascinating.

 The kids loved it. Well, Bean and Bug did. Peanut was pretty happy on my back, but he was tired and I think he'd had enough sight seeing to last him for the rest of the year.

 There were several of these "curtain" formations.

 This one had some parts that were so thin, they were translucent.

 Getting near the end of the 1.2 mile path through the caves.

 But there was still one last incredible feature--the Great Stalacpipe Organ.

 In the 1950's, Leland W. Sprinkle came up with this organ that is connected to these little rubber mallets that tap the stalactites, producing the various sounds. They played a song for us and it is beautiful. It's in a huge room, where they also have weddings.

 This is the wishing well, where pennies have turned the water green.

And one last formation on the way out--the fried eggs. Crazy what dripping water can do.

And that was the end of our big Summer 2015 trip. We made it home around 9 p.m., to find a leak from the kitchen faucet and ants trying to invade the house, but we were home.

Going Back to Our Roots

After crossing the border, we were in New York, which was a new state for all of us but Daddy-o who spent a weekend in NYC last fall. We had decided to spend a couple nights in Rochester on the way home so we could visit some historical sights for our church.

For those of you who aren't familiar with LDS history, Palmyra, NY was the home of Joseph Smith who was the first prophet of the restored church.  This is a recreation of the cabin that he lived in at age 14 when it all began.

Our church has a pretty thorough set up on the property which gave us a good feel for what it would have been like to live there almost 200 years ago.

There was a very nice missionary who showed us around the home and told us stories.

I was actually surprised by both this cabin and the frame home they built later. I'd always heard about the large family living in tight quarters, and while this wasn't a large home by any means, the parents did have an actual bedroom downstairs and there was even another small bedroom built added on to it later.

Sure, there were a lot of kids living there, and most of them slept upstairs in the half attic/half bedrooms, but it felt more spacious than I've imagined it.

Here's the attic where Joseph slept with his brothers (and his sisters were in a small bedroom built behind the main space here.) This is where the angel Moroni appeared to him several times in one night to teach him. It is amazing that something so profound happened in such a simple place, but I feel like it is a good reminder that what God sees and values is so different than what we see through our very human eyes.

I thought the cabin was really well done, down to the details of what would have existed in an 1820's home.

A couple years later, the Smith's built a larger home on a different part of their farm and moved over there.

This home is still the original house, and includes some of the original pieces.

These are the bricks that Joseph hid the Gold Plates beneath to protect them from the mob of people who wanted to take them.

This home was really very large.

It had a beautiful pantry, and once again, the details were really well done.

It was pretty easy to imagine living here.

The main bedroom was much larger than I'd ever imagined a non 20th or 21st century bedroom.

The kids noticed the absence of a faucet right away. We got to see the well out in the yard where they would have gotten their water. Makes us appreciate the modern conveniences (although when we came home to a leak under the kitchen sink from the convenient faucet, it was a little harder to be grateful for it.)

Another thing I never knew--Joseph Smith Sr. and one of the older sons were barrel makers, or coopers, and farming was more secondary to the family income.

The farm land is really beautiful. The thought of how they had to clear the forest and make the miles of fencing is overwhelming.

The road leading to the Sacred Grove.

This was another part that I was surprised by. I'd always pictured a small clearing in the forest where they knew that he had gone to pray.

But it turns out, and I suppose makes sense considering how long ago this was, that there's a huge forest out there and all they know is that he was somewhere out there behind the log cabin. There are several trails running through the woods that you can walk on and it's beautiful and could be peaceful if you didn't have kids with you.

It was still nice, just not quite the spiritual experience that I hear people talk about when they visit, haha. Luckily, we were the only ones out there for awhile, so at least we weren't disrupting other people's quiet moments.

After that, we headed over to the Hill Cumorah, which is where Joseph was told to go get the gold plates (which he translated and are now the Book of Mormon). There's a huge pageant every summer, but we missed it by a couple weeks, which was both bad and good. At least we didn't have crowds of people at the various sites.

This kid was cracking me up while we were there. This was Day 8 of our trip and we'd been taking a LOT of pictures. Rather than getting burnt out on the whole smiling things, Peanut decided he was a model and kept posing for me.

"Take a picture of this, Mama!"

"Now, take this one!"

"And another one!"

"Take a picture of this, too!"

Hahaha! My funny, funny boy. Seriously, 4 is such a better age than 3!

(Some of our other kids may have been getting tired of the picture taking, or just each other. Who knows. It all bleeds into one big grumpy mess by Day 8.)