Temple Square - Salt Lake City

Mark is still in Oklahoma City, waiting through more tests and test results for his Father.  They were finally able to do the colonoscopy, where the doctors found a malignant mass in Clarence's upper colon.  So surgery is scheduled, and we are both very glad that Mark and his brothers and sister are all there at the hospital.  

Denisa is glad that her Mother just happens to be visiting during this difficult time.  The list of the activities that she had originally planned for her Mother's visit to Salt Lake City included places that Mark could dart in and out of traffic while she navigated his turns.  We're a good team in new territory.  But now that Mark is away in Oklahoma, we went to Plan B.  Part of that plan was learning to navigate the public transportation system to get us places without the traffic and the problems of finding parking downtown.  So we drove to the Draper Town Center TRAX station and purchased round trip tickets to Temple Square at the electronic kiosk. Seniority has its advantages, as Mother's ticket was half-price.

This is the southern-most station of the blue line of the TRAX system, so we were the first to board and had the car to ourselves.  That made for an easy photo opportunity.  The cars are clean and offer good views of the passing scenery from those big windows.  But we can verify that they have a definite sway from side to side as they pick up speed.  In a mere 19 stops and 43 minutes, we arrived downtown at the station closest to Temple Square.

This area of downtown is beautiful, with carefully landscaped flower beds.  Denisa called ahead and reserved a wheel chair for Mother.  She can certainly walk from place to place, but this will conserve some of her energy and speed up the trips between buildings today.

We saw views of the outside of the famous Salt Lake Temple, and it was beautiful against today's blue sky.

It took 40 years to build, and was completed in 1893.  Visitors are not allowed inside this holy temple, but we could see a model of the interior in the south visitor's center.

Our next stop was the Tabernacle, which does allow visitors.  Actually designed and built by a bridge builder that had never constructed a building, it's ceiling was formed like a bridge trestle so there are no columns inside to support the weight of the roof.

This unique design also led to amazing acoustics.  Our tour guide demonstrated by standing at the front of this huge auditorium and ripping a single newspaper page.  We could hear ever rip at the back.  She dropped three pins, and we could hear each one clearly.  When she dropped a nail, it was loud enough to get our attention.  She could turn 360 degrees and speak without a microphone and we could hear her clearly as she rotated.

But the real reason we were here was to experience the pipe organ recital scheduled for 12:00.  This pipe organ has 11,623 pipes--one of the biggest in the world.  When the tabernacle organist played his 30-minute recital, he used all five keyboards, all the foot pedals, and many of the stops on the sides.  It filled the tabernacle in a way that made your chest vibrate.  Mother had to take out her hearing aids because it was too loud!

By now it was time for lunch, and we ate a great meal at the Lion House Pantry downtown.  This building was originally one of Brigham Young's homes, and has now been converted to a restaurant.  Known for healthy home-cooked meals, we felt good about our choices here.  But they are famous for their fresh yeast rolls, and they purposefully bake them in ovens at the front door so you smell them as soon as you enter.  No food pictures, but we can affirm that their salmon and pork chops with steamed broccoli and rice were very pretty and tasty.

We also took a tour of the BeeHive house, where Brigham Young lived while he was prophet, leader of the church of latter day saints, governor of Utah, and head of Indian Affairs.  Only one of his   wives lived in this house.  The other wives (somewhere between 27 and 53 based on different sources) and most of his 63 children lived down the street.

We spent much of the afternoon in the Family Search Center, where volunteers schooled us in all things about genealogy.  We were greeted warmly and assigned our personal expert that helped us through the maze of the ancestry website.  We came armed with names and birth and death dates of several generations.  We found we should have also brought marriage dates, as that is another good way to find connections.  It was fun to see census records from the 1920's and 1930's with family names hand-written on them.  Since Denisa's parents were raised only 3 miles apart, her Mother recognized the names of their childhood families and neighbors on those old census documents.  We also corrected some information, including an aunt that was in the system as deceased.  After attending her 95th birthday last year, we could both verify that she is very much alive and kicking.  When you tire of staring at the computer screen, they have a photo shot set up for you to remember your time searching for ancestors.

We also circled by the north visitor center, where there are wall size pictures that outline the life of Christ.  Upstairs there is an 11-foot marble statue of Jesus that is stunning.

We were tiring from a busy day, but Denisa had one more thing on her downtown list.  The state capitol is close to this area and she wanted to see it.  She left her Mother and the wheel chair parked in the shade and hiked straight up the hill towards the state buildings.  In a historic neighborhood with large trees, you can't see it until you get to the very top of the hill.  Closely resembling the federal capitol, we didn't have time to go inside today, so we will have to return.

We were blessed with beautiful weather today, and rolling around temple square was fun. We had planned to stay until 7:30, in order to listen to the rehearsal of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  But we were both fading fast, and the idea of finding and riding the train back home after dark was getting less appealing.  So we hopped on our TRAX train and were home before sunset.  

It was a good day, even though we were both worried about Clarence, and sure missed having Mark there with us!