Nauvoo trip

On July 7th and 8th Emily and I found ourselves down in Nauvoo, Illinois. We had a few reasons for making our way there, which I'll recount here:

1) Nauvoo is a Mormon church history site that I had never visited, and Emily had only been to once. While we're here in Michigan we're in reasonably close proximity to several church history sites, and we haven't taken as good advantage of this situation as we probably should have.

2) Emily's mom and her brother Scott and his family were going to be in Nauvoo at those dates, so we could see some of her family and they could meet Lizzie for the first time. They also have a son we had not seen who is a few months older than Lizzie.

3) We needed to steal Emily's mom's car, and this seemed like as good a chance as any we were likely to get. You see, come September Emily's mom will be coming out to live near us for a few months (really, really near to us, in the same apartment complex). She's going to help us out as we are both beginning our dissertations. She'll watch Lizzie some every day so both Emily and I can get several quality hours of school work done. This will be a huge blessing for us, as we both need the time to get a good initial push into this final stage of our PhD programs. While she is here, she needs to have a car. There were several options for her to get her car out here, but in the end this trip to Nauvoo seemed to be the best choice. She drove out with her car loaded with some belongings, we met her in Nauvoo and drove her car back to Michigan, and she rode back to Idaho with Scott and his family. Emily and I aren't really certain how we can repay her mom for the generosity of coming out here, but we are really thankful that she's doing this for us.

So, with those reasons for going to Nauvoo, we finally made a trip there. Emily, Lizzie, and I rode on a train to Chicago, then to a city that is only a few minutes outside of Nauvoo. This was our first trip with Lizzie, and the train was a pretty low stress way to travel (we're flying back to Utah this week, so that will be a different experience). The seats were quite spacious, and when Lizzie got fussy I was able to walk up and down the aisles with her. Also, she was interested in the scenery flying by:


Here's Lizzie in Chicago holding up a couple skyscrapers:


And here we are in front of the Nauvoo temple:


Lizzie, Emily, and her mom in front of a statue of Joseph and Hyrum Smith:


This is the room above The Red Brick Store where many early church meetings took place:



We walked around the city, which is right on the Mississippi River:



People often note that Lizzie has some big blue eyes, and this picture shows them off a bit:


Not only did we visit Nauvoo, we also visited Carthage, Illinois before coming back to Michigan. Carthage is where Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were martyred: