I was hoping, with it being the first day of Spring and all, to see a little bit of green, but nope.

So what an awesome week this was!

We (as you can probably see) went to the Palmyra temple and it was wonderful! It is a smaller temple, it overlooks the Sacred Grove. Very beautiful. J has been doing family history so we were able to attend the temple with her and a bunch of people from the stake (it was a stake temple trip) and it was really great, she did baptisms for many of her kindred dead, T did some others, and I was able to receive the endowment afterwards for one of them. Very very spiritual the whole time, J was crying throughout. There is a special Spirit that is there for baptisms for your ancestors that doesn't exist necessarily otherwise, you can really feel the connection. very neat and beautiful experience.

We were in a hurry, but we also took a tour of the Book of Mormon printing press. The first 5000 copies were printed by E.B. Grandin, and the shop is still well preserved. The tour was quite good and interesting.  I learned a lot about the process of setting the type, inking, and binding- and also that it took almost two years for the Book of Mormon to be published after is was handed in. Long time, right? That must have been super frustrating for the Prophet to knock out the translation in 65 working days and then have to stew around for a couple of years. Tour was done by a sister missionary, she was kind of clueless... didn't know the answers to a lot of the questions I asked just out of genuine curiosity. 

The next thing we did was visit the Joseph Smith farm, which was really neat. The sister missionaries who gave the tour here were much more prepared and informed, I'll have you note. I learned a lot here. The house was really really small, especially for 11 people. We went to the upstairs room where Joseph Smith was first visited by the angel Moroni, and it is tiny! Plus there would have been three other people in the room (other siblings) sleeping with him! That's not something you see in the movie version. I guess they were just super sound sleepers.

Finally we walked through the Sacred Grove. I was hoping, with it being the first day of Spring and all, to see a little bit of green, but nope. Still quite snowy and bare. Still, it was super serene and peaceful. Just a beautiful and spiritual place. There isn't an exact location for where Joseph Smith saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, it's just a series of trails you can walk. I would have loved to spend more time here. We should come back some time as a family to see the Hill Cumorah pageant and see these sites! 

All in all, a long and exhausting day, very cool though. I loved it.

Elder Wright