Goodbyes are not forever.

June 28, 2018

A Thursday - and we started our drive from Cincinnati back to Lindon, Utah.

Before we packed up the car and left we cleaned our apartment.

Moved all we could out to the front room so it would be easier to clean out.

Somewhere in Indiana we found this nice little rest stop.  We stretched out legs and walked around in the shade by the pond.

This is the "Salt Kettle" rest stop.  The first settlers found a 'salt spring'.  They would boil the water in big kettles and then use the salt to preserve their food.

Most of the scenery was exactly the same - corn corn and more corn.  In fact we traveled through 3 consecutive states of corn - Indiana Iowa and Nebraska.  Usually corn and soybean side by side.  Alternating these two crops helps condition the soil.

Our first stop for the night was in Fort Madison Ohio.  Just across the Mississippi River from Nauvoo Illinois.

The Nauvoo Temple is a beautiful building!  The grounds are well kept.  Our day in Nauvoo was HOT and HUMID.

This sculpture of Joseph and Hyrum Smith is one of my favorites.  "In life they were not devided and in dean

We found Sister Svedin in the boot shop.  We learned how boots and shoes were made in the 1840's.  It was good to see this sister who served with us for six months in Ohio Cincinnati while she was "Outbound"

The temple is situated so it is seem from almost every location in Nauvoo.  A good reminder to keep an eternal perspective in everything we do.

I loved the John Browning Gun Shop.  Amazing that one man can have such an impact on the world.  His guns and rifles are legendary - 

We went down Parley Street to the Mississippi.  Look at the Lillie pads!  Some were as big as placemats.

An ideal place to soak up some rays and dry our a little bit.

We went to the Brick Yard and Elder Hill gave us a behind the scenes tour of how bricks were made.  Each visitor to the brick yard gets his very own brick.

This is the kiln where the bricks are fired.  Before firing they are brown and muddy looking.  During the firing process the iron in the clay turns the bricks reddish. The bricks from different parts of the kiln are different shades of red.

This is where the windows for the temple were made.

After lunch we drove 30 minutes to Carthage for a visit to the Carthage Jail site.  This is the window that the Prophet Joseph fell out of when he was shot.

This is the original door with the bullet holes.  The one in the door itself is from the bullet that killed Hyrum.

After the Prophet was shot with four balls he fell from the window on the second floor and landed near the well below.

It is so warm and humid that some of the plants grow really big.  All of the buildings were air conditioned.  There was such a temperature and humidity difference between inside and outside that each time we came out of a building our glasses would fog up.

After dinner we went back to the visitor Nauvoo visitors center and walked through the "Women's Garden"

Several statures depicting the important roll women play in the families of the world.

There are 52 "young performing missionaries" called to the Nauvoo Visitors Center Mission.  So much talent.  In the heat and humidity they work very hard.

The senior missionaries also get up on the stage - This looks a lot harder and scarier than taking care of the office and watching over the 70 cars in our mission.

That night on our way back to our hotel across the river we got stuck on a "swivel bridge" while a team of barges went down river.

There were 12 barges tied together - each barge holds the equivalent of 750 40' semi trailers.  That will give you an idea of how important the Mississippi River is to the commerce of the area.

We were going to spend the next day in Nauvoo also - but it was so hot and we really did all we wanted to do so the next morning we headed west again and decided to stop in Omaha Nebraska at the Winter Quarters Visitors Center.

This is the site of Winter Quarters where the first refugees from the Nauvoo exodus of 1846 spent their first winter.  'The plan was to make it to the Rocky Mountains that first year - but it took them 5 months to cross Iowa.

 Winter Quarters was used as a stop over area for two years then it was abandoned.  That first winter hundreds died here - the twin plagues of cholera and dysentery claimed most of those lives - and most of them were children.

After spending the night in Lincoln Nebraska - we found a LDS church and attended Sacrament meeting before heading west again.  More corn for two thirds of Nebraska then grain and grass till the sagebrush of Wyoming.  Spent our last night on the road in Cheyenne Wyoming.

Our next sight of any significance was this mountain.  

Now people - that is a mountain.

We arrived home about four in the afternoon of July 2, 2018