Day 59 -- Cleanup and visit to the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City

Friday 8/18/2006

The kids have talked about wanting to eat the campground's breakfast. I was a bit ambivalent about it since the one we had back in Tacoma was not all that great. Here the cost was $5/person for an all you can eat buffet. No funny tax was added, coffee was included and there were plenty of items to chose from. We sat down at a table outside the food trailer. It tasted great. Everyone was very please with this meal. We can highly reommend it.

After breakfast I needed to get down into town and buy some parts for the trailer. At minimum, I needed a new sewer hose. There was a place not far from the campground. My only question was if they'd have a Thetford fitting or not. As it turns out, they did. So I returned back to the camper with a brand new 20ft hose, which I promptly rigged and then proceeded to dump out graywater tank. This made it possible for us to do the dishes again. We did not some more cleaning of the trailer, laundry and then headed out on a daytrip to downtown Salt Lake City for a tour of the Mormon Church HQ.

The Mormons founded this town. They built a church complex around which the town later sprung up. Their church complex is rather impressive and merits a visit even if you are not religious. Just like we see mormons walk from house to house back home in New Hampshire, you bump into friendly tag-teams in suits along the sidewalks of town too, trying to spread their message. We started out at one of their visitors centers and then viewed a number of different exhibits, some describing the hardship of the mormons as they arrived here and others (the majority) of religious nature.

Karl and Erik play with an interactive model of ancient Jerusalem at the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City

A statue of Jesus looks at followers below

The mormon bible in the world's languages

Yea

The mormons love flowers and have many beautiful displays in town

After we arrived in the park we discovered that they have plenty of boon docking campsites with great views. Must be especially nice if you are a rock climber. We saw many of them climbing the various rounded rock formations here.

A visit to the mormon church HQ is not complete without some searching of your past

As it turns out, we did not find much new informtion about the Hamnqvist family here. The data is only as good as the information entered by its operators. It would seem like the somewhat shallow information available about our family tree confirms we are not very religious, at least not in the mormon sense. Nevertheless, this place is a fabulous goldmine of information. Those that work there, mainly missionaries, are curteous and very helpful. We headed back to the campground and took care of some final cleanups, ate dinner and then went to bed.

The front skin had separated completely from the ribs at the bottom so I had to band-aid it in place with force

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All Pictures (c) 2006 Hamnqvist, Background features the Yukon Sky.