Utah Day 2: SLC

Saturday I let Kendra and my Mom sleep in, while I went and visited President and Sister Grames!

It was really great to see them again, and I was so proud of myself for remembering to actually take a picture this time!  Pres. Grames just published his three volume history of the Church in Japan.  He said he researched it for 25 years, and then was writing it for 10!  What an incredible feat!!!  (He said that the hardest part was finding a publisher in Japan!)

We had a lovely visit, and then it was time to head back to Jenna's and wake up Kendra!  Once she and my Mom were both ready, we got brunch at a diner that Nick had recommended-- The Hub and Spoke.  The place was packed and loud, but then they ushered us into another room that was nearly empty and blissfully quiet!  What luck!  And even better, the food was excellent!  AND the diner turned out to be in the same neighborhood as my grandparents' childhood homes!  So after we'd eaten, we drove by both their homes, which was very cool.  (My Grandma's house especially blows my mind because it is not that big, but she was one of ten siblings!  How did they fit them all in there???)

And then we headed to Temple Square to see the new Visitor's Center!  Reader, no lie, when I saw the Salt Lake Temple without scaffolding all over it, I got teary-eyed.  What a sight!

So pretty!!!

I love when they have these amazing 3-D models!  Who builds these???  (I don't see them in this model, but my favorite is when they have miniatures of the paintings inside!)

They had models of several of our large temples, and I would like to point out that (assuming they used the same scale for all of them?) DC's temple is totally bigger than Salt Lake's!

No doubt about it!

The new visitor's center is really well done.  They basically have full-size replicas of all the major rooms in a temple so you can walk through the whole thing.  The Salt Lake temple is going to have a HUGE open house starting next spring, but even if you miss it, you could still do this new tour.  It's a brilliant idea.

When we got out, it looked like it was going to rain, which made for some very cool pictures:

It being Utah, all we got were a few drops.  Clouds like that in Virginia would have been a very different story!

Next we headed to Caputo's, a small Italian diner/grocery store/chocolate shop.  What you see here is just a section of their chocolate bars.  We spent a VERY LONG TIME poring over which bars we needed to try.  My Mom only sighed in disappointment at my preferences for milk chocolate a couple times.

They also let you sample a lot of the stuff before you bought it, which was so nice of them, we bought even more!  Good sales strategy!

Also, I found these cute pig statues and had to send a picture of them to Ryder!

Finally we went to the Wasatch Lawn Cemetery.  We have a lot of family that were buried there, but unfortunately it is a HUGE cemetery, and the office was closed and we couldn't get the Billion Graves website to work.  So after driving around for a bit, we finally gave up on the idea of being able to just find any of the people we were looking for.  We'll have to try again some other day.  

We got Cafe Rio for dinner and picked up cookies from Crave and ate a few in my Mom's hotel room.  And then shared the rest with Jenna and Nick and stayed up way too late hanging out with them!  That was especially fun since I'd barely seen them so far!