Julie was awesome to watch our kids while Jeff and I left early to drive to Salt Lake to attend a live session at the Temple there. We then planned to have her drive up 2 hours after us and meet us outside the temple with all the kids.
I have never been in the Salt Lake temple other than to do baptisms when I was in college so I was really looking forward to the experience. We were both worried about being tired since we went to a late showing of the movie "Inception" at an IMAX theater with Jeff's brother Timothy and his girlfriend. I should never have worried because I was so captivated the entire time with the beautiful architecture and being a live session.
While sitting inside I was really touched by the sacrifice of the early saints who came to this valley as pioneers and sacrificed to build this gorgeous, amazing building. I felt it was a special way to remember the pioneers with the 24th of July this week.
We ate lunch in the temple cafeteria since we had to meet up with Julie. I thought it was fun that Jeff's entree rang up as "temple pork." We quickly changed clothes in the van in the parking garage and ran into Julie just as she was getting there with the kids.
We only had a short time to spend at temple square before we had to be to our scheduled factory tours. It was fun taking James to see the large Christus statue in the visitors center. He kept pointing at the universe painted on the ceiling and saying, " Look at all the Milky Ways." We had just enough time to go to the South Visitors Center to see the new 6 ft tall replica of the temple with cut away sides showing all the rooms inside to scale. It even had mini working chandeliers!
After leaving the temple we just made it to the Mrs. Field's cookie factory for our scheduled tour. We all had to wear hair nets, including Luke, who is only 4 months old! They didn't allow pictures in the factory but there really wasn't a lot to see. It turns out this is their really slow season so there wasn't much activity except a few tins being packaged with cookies. They don't make the dough here, only bake it to send out in their gift orders. I'd love to come back at Christmas when they are swamped with orders.
It was much more fun at the Sweet's candy factory tour. Again we all donned the hair nets and even had to remove all rings and other jewelry. They even made Callie cut off her plastic wrist band from her admission at a water park, even though there was no way she could have taken it off. They gave us plenty of samples along the way like a giant jelly bean, chocolate orange stick, jelly bar, and salt water taffy. The best by far was the taffy and we ended up buying a pound in their gift store before we left.
Afterwards we drove to Orem and met up with Craig and Timothy at Spaghetti Factory for dinner. We all had reading coupons which got each kid a free meal for reading 5 books.
No comments:
Post a Comment