New York Capitol Building

Niagara Falls

Columbus Ohio Capitol Building

Columbus Ohio Temple

Nauvoo, Illinois

After we left Boston we took a week to drive to Seattle.  We had so many things that we wanted to do on the trip, but due to time constraints we mostly just did about one thing a day.  Before we left Massachusetts we stopped in my mom’s home town to have dinner with her twin sisters, our aunts.  It was such a fun dinner.  They even made us cookies to take on the drive with us.  We then continued our drive to Albany where we stayed for the night.

The next morning, Thursday May 30th, we toured the New York capitol building.  It was amazing!!!  It was built in the height of the gilded age.  I have such a huge fascination with this time period, and this building epitomizes so much of it.  The building itself was so enormous.  They had one of the coolest staircases I have seen, all a reddish orange stone with beautiful lights all throughout and just winding in and out over 4 stories and opening up at the top, it was so cool.  After the tour we continued to Columbus, Ohio where we stayed for the night.  On the way my sister realized how close we were passing through Niagara Falls, so we took a little unplanned detour.  This was one of things I had really wanted to do when we were planning the trip, but she thought it was too far out of the way.  I was so happy we were able to do it, it is so cool and I haven’t been since I was in my teens.  We took the Maid of the Mist tour, which is so cool to be able to see so much of the falls, and you get so close to the horseshoe part of the falls that the mist was so thick we got soaked and couldn’t even keep our eyes open for the closest parts.

Friday, May 31st we first toured the Columbus capitol building.  It was so different after seeing the New York one, much more simple.  I really liked the grounds, they had a flower flag which I loved and right next to it there is a memorial that they engraved a bunch of letters from soldiers and made them looks like old school letters on the memorial.  I also really liked the mosaic floor underneath the dome.  The stones got bigger as it expanded out of the center and I am always so impressed with how the stonecutters are able to get them so perfectly matched up and are able to figure out the design.  After that we went to the Columbus temple.   This is a more simple temple, but I loved the white marble stone and the huge round planters by the entrance.  From Columbus we drove to Dayton where we stopped to stay with one of my cousins.  I seriously have the funnest cousins, and I always love being able to spend time with them.  It was so nice of them to let us stay with them.  They were super busy because just a few days before they had a tornado come through their area and they were busy helping clean up and feed those in need.

On Saturday, we continued the long drive to Nauvoo, Illinois.  This is a special place for the history of our church and they have reconstructed a lot of the town to look like it did back then, and to be able to learn about and see what it was like and about our church history.  We got there at 4:00 so we had one hour before the historic buildings all closed, so we did a quick stop at some of the ones we were most interested in.  After that we were then able to go to the temple.  This is definitely up there in one of my favorites.  The original was burned down in 1800’s and this one was reconstructed in 2002, as close to the original as possible and it was so pretty.  We had our longest driving stretch after that, so we drove a few more hours, before stopping somewhere in Iowa for the night.