Family Vacation 2012 - Part III

I started with Part I so if you want to start at the beginning of the trip you'll need to begin two posts down and read backwards. :)

We left Illinois on the afternoon of Day eight and drove to Council Bluffs, Iowa. This was about a 7 hour drive so we arrived in the evening and didn't do much else that day.

Day Nine:
We visited the Kanesvile Tabernacle in Council Bluffs. It was a quick trip, not much to see there but a visitor's center and a renovated tabernacle. This was where Brigham Young was officially sustained as the new prophet following the death of Joseph Smith.

From there we headed into Nebraska to Winter Quarters.

We took pictures of the temple, visited the Visitor's Center and wandered through the cemetery. I had a great-great-great grandpa (Thomas Butterfield, founder of Herriman) who traveled west with the saints and he spent about two years in Winter Quarters. So it was really fun for me to learn more about that place and what the saints did there.

One of the things I learned there, that I found most fascinating, was that the trip from Navuoo, IL to Winter Quarters, NE took the first group of saints about five months to make. It was incredibly muddy and one man recorded in his journal "only crossed one mud puddle today. It was six miles long!" The trip that distance should have taken 5 weeks but due to the mud, it took five months. It was later found out that while the saints were forging miles-long mud puddles to get to Winter Quarters, there were actually Indian Wars going on there at the time. So if they had arrived in 5 weeks as they should have, they could have been in terrible danger (right in the middle of these Indian Wars). So by some miracle, the mud slowed them down and allowed them to arrive at Winter Quarters after the Indian Wars ended. This story definitely taught me an important lesson: there are always blessings in trials.

Winter Quarters was the last "stop" on our trip. We left there around 1pm, grabbed some lunch and then started our journey home. We stopped again in Cheyenne, Wyoming over night and then the next day (Day 10) we made the final 7 hour stretch home. In the course of 10 days we spent about half of them in the car but it was still a lot of fun. I love road trips and it was even more fun to caravan with my family. We had between 23 and 29 of us (out of 36) on this trip so it was a big crowd but I wouldn't trade that experience for anything! The kids kept us entertained and even though it was exhausting and at least all of us had a break down at one point or another, we still had plenty of laughs.