Nauvoo Trip

So for the 4th of July weekend we traveled over to Nauvoo and Carthage, Illinois. It was a good trip. Sharie had never been there before and I last went when I was only 7 so I didn't remember a whole lot. We stayed in a town on the Iowa side of the Mississippi River called Keokuk. We left on Friday after work and traveled to Stuart, Iowa, stayed the night at the Super 8 there then went the rest of the way on Saturday. We stopped in the little town called Fairfield whose population was probably right around 1000 and even their public pool had a couple of water slides. C'mon Tri-Cities! Get it together! Pasco finally just put in 2 slides at their public pool after how many years? Whoever builds a water park in Tri-town will make some good money. It just has to have so many slides, a wave pool, lazy river and a kid area (special attention should be payed to the kid area because that determines how many parents will go there, too!).

Aaaaanyway, Saturday we got to the Hotel in Keokuk and tried to get Nathan to take a nap but he was overly tired so he wouldn't so we went to Nauvoo which was only about 20 minutes away and while Nate and I were in the car waiting for Sharie to drop something off at the hotel (between going to Wal-mart and then to Nauvoo), Nathan fell asleep. What a little stinker. Oh well he got an hour nap which helped him. Unfortunately everything closes at 7 in Nauvoo on Saturdays so we didn't have a whole lot of time there.

We went to the visitor's center then to Brigham

Young's house and up to the temple for a bit. It's a purdy purdy temple.

Back to the hotel we went. We swam and ate some pizza then went to bed. Sunday we went to Carthage and were on one of the 1st tours they did and going into the jail was a cool experience. I have always had a picture of it in my head from when I was 7 and after we were done I went and stood at the exact spot I remember standing when I was 7, so that was kinda cool to be able to do that. Sharie really enjoyed it. Our tour was pretty packed and Nathan didn't like sitting still so that made it kind of difficult but other than that, it was really good. So

after the tour there we went back to the hotel for Nathan (and us) to take a nap. We all woke up about 3:30 and I looked online and on the website for Nauvoo it said everything closed at 6:00

on Sundays but when we got there at 4:00 we were informed that they really closed at 5:00 :-( So we went to a tinsmith house, the little school house, John Taylor's home and Wilford Woodruff's house. We went kinda fast but it was still a good experience.

Then Monday we just traveled back the whole 7 1/2 hours to Grand Island and Nathan did awesome that whole trip. So that was our trip for the 4th of July weekend. It was a great experience to get back and see church sites.