Sunday, April 16th was Easter Sunday, but it was also the day that Tom was traveling back from Italy and I was meeting him in Boston to pack up all his things and officially move him to Utah! It was an exciting time and our first official “move.” Tom arrived late on Sunday evening and I picked him up from the airport (as my flight had arrived earlier that morning). It was so great to be reunited! Tom had been gone for about 10 days (with a work trip preceding his Italy trip) so we definitely missed each other! We don’t like being apart, but absence definitely makes the heart grow MUCH fonder. 🙂
Monday, April 17th was moving day, but thankfully we were able to pack in some other fun activities and really enjoy our day together! We started by having breakfast at this fun diner a few blocks from Tom’s house called The Breakfast Club. It’s based on the 1980’s film and it was so fun! The food was delicious too and a great way to start the day!
After breakfast, we took a walk down by the Charles River and watched some rowing teams practice… It was pretty cool! There were also some really pretty ducks and swans and it was such a beautiful day!
We then went to the Mt. Auburn Cemetery, which is the oldest landscaped cemetery in the country. It was SO big and SO pretty! We walked around, admiring the grounds, and then we hiked to the top of the Washington Tower so we could get a full view of the cemetery and the city… It was simply gorgeous!
After the cemetery, we went back to Tom’s place and did some packing before heading over to the Boston Marathon. Tom’s friend Sarah (who is married to his friend, Gabe) was running in the marathon and it was fun to be there and feel the energy! We both felt inspired to run another marathon, but we’ll see how that goes… 🙂
After the marathon, we went back and finished packing. We cleaned out the room and then packed the car as full as it could get before heading out on the road for the first stretch of our journey! We headed to upstate New York to begin our journey the next day in Palmyra!
Our first stop (Tuesday morning) was the Whitmer Farm. I was really glad Tom mentioned this stop as I hadn’t included it on our initial schedule (not sure why!) and he thought of it in just enough time for us to include it as a stop without it causing us a detour or backtracking. When we pulled up to the farm, it was amazing to feel the power of the grounds before we even walked in! The Church has done such a great job of restoring the land and making it a tourist site, and it was really wonderful!
There was no one there when we arrived, so we thought it was closed, but then two women came out and they said it was still open. We went inside and met with the senior missionary couple assigned there, and the husband gave us the tour. First we walked around the visitor center and he gave us some of the history of the land and site, and then he took us to the actual Whitmer home. While it’s only a re-creation, it was still really neat to be there and be on the land where the Church was officially organized. Additionally, it was humbling to be in this tiny room where the first six members of the Church were, and compare that to the experience we had at General Conference a few weeks ago with tens of thousands of members in the Conference Center, with millions more watching worldwide. It’s so neat to think about Joseph Smith’s vision and what he must have known would come with the growth of the Church… We’re so grateful for his courage, strength, and determination to begin this work and that I now get to be so incredibly blessed by his efforts! After we toured the house, we finished with a video called “The Growth of the Church” in the visitor center. We were reminded that so many people sacrificed so much to help grow this Church, and it made us start thinking about how easy it is to live the Gospel and how we need to figure out how I can honor the sacrifices made and make sacrifices of my own. 🙂
Our second stop was the Hill Cumorah, which was also quite an amazing experience! As we hiked up the Hill Cumorah and were talking about some of the rumors that circulate about it, we realized that by hoping to have “lightning-bolt” experiences at all these sites, we were missing the bigger picture. President Thomas S. Monson gave a talk in General Conference a couple years ago where he mentioned that people had been visiting the Holy Land to feel closer to Jesus, but that learning about the Savior and trying to be like Him was far more important than walking where He walked; we definitely felt this was as we walked around the Hill Cumorah. It was beautiful and big and it was really neat to be there!
Our next stop was the Palmyra temple. When we arrived, there were just a few cars in the parking lot so we figured it was closed. We walked up to it and got a few pictures, and then as we were getting a picture in the front, a couple came up and asked if we wanted them to take a picture for us. We of course did, and after we talked to them for a bit. Turns out it was a member of the temple presidency (Brother and Sister Miner) and they were really sweet! They recommended some restaurants and dishes for us in Buffalo, which was on our way to Kirtland, and even explained to us that the reason we call buffalo wings, buffalo wings is because they originated in Buffalo, New York! We admit we’ve never known why they were called that, so this was a fun (and very random!) thing to learn!
After the temple we drove down the street (literally!) to the Smith family property where Joseph lived as a child with his family. The property was rather large and had many buildings/sites on it. When we arrived, a family was just beginning their tour with one of the sweet senior sister missionaries, so we joined them. She explained some of the history to us and then took us to the first site, which was the Smith family log home. This was the home where Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith first lived with their young family (including the Prophet Joseph) when they came to Palmyra, and boy was it tiny! I can’t imagine having such a large family in such a small space, but they sure did it! The ceilings were especially low, too… Poor Tom had to duck everywhere, including just as he walked through!
The upstairs of the house is where Joseph would have been when the Angel Moroni visited him and told him about the plates, and what was interesting to us about that is how close quarters it was! In the picture we often see in the Church, it makes it look like Joseph was in a room by himself, but really, he would have just been in the upstairs loft bedroom with a bunch of his siblings. It’s neat to think that the Lord allowed Joseph to have the visit of the Angel Moroni while everyone else slept!
After the log home, we visited the Smith family frame house, which was a much bigger home that Alvin Smith began building for his family, but didn’t finish because he passed away. The Smiths later finished the home, but they lost it due to financial struggles. It’s sad to hear about the struggles they had, and yet they were such good, faithful people anyway! They moved back to the log home after they lost their home (and had to work to get it sold to a friend instead of a former-friend/thief who tried to buy it out from under them).
The other buildings on the property included a threshing barn (we learned what that meant when it came to their work with wheat!) and a cooper shop (which we also learned what that meant when it came to Joseph Sr.’s profession making wood and metal baskets). It was cool to see the property where Joseph Smith began questioning which church was right and later received a visit from the Angel Moroni… Such a humbling experience!
The Sacred Grove is part of the Smith property, and it sits back behind and is essentially its own special place. It’s actually not what I was thinking it was at all! I had this idea in my head that the grove where the Prophet Joseph had the First Vision was on display and could be looked at, but really, that’s so not the case! The Sacred Grove is a HUGE property located just west of the Smith farm and the Church has put all these paths through it. We don’t know exactly where the First Vision was, but it was somewhere there.
While we were in the Sacred Grove, it was so very peaceful. We sat on a bench at one point and were silent for a bit, and it was just a beautiful experience. There was a fly that kept bothering us, and it was kind of a funny reminder that Satan would try to disturb us especially when we are trying to have special moments! It was really nice being in the Sacred Grove though, and we especially appreciated that it was in nature and somewhere that we too would generally feel especially close to the Spirit, as the Prophet Joseph did. 🙂
Our last history stop of the day was to downtown Palmyra where the first publication site of the Book or Mormon is located. The story of how the Book of Mormon first came to be published, as well as being able to walk through the store and see how it was actually printed and put together, made us feel like we definitely take for granted how easily we have access to the scriptures! It was such a process to put the book together, and it gave us a renewed desire to more fully make the book part of our daily life. We can’t even believe how much it took to print the Books of Mormon, let alone how much it took for the Prophet Joseph to translate it and his scribes to write it. We talked about how grateful we are for their work and how we hope to honor their efforts by more consistently studying it in our lives. 🙂
After visiting the Palmyra sites, we got back on the road and went to Buffalo, New York for wings (upon the recommendation of the couple we met at the temple!). We went to a place called Duff’s, which had good ratings, but it ended up not being too great. The loaded tater tots were pretty delicious though, and it was just fun to be together!
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