The next day we met our friends, the Garcias, in Salt Lake City. They wanted to take a tour of the LDS Conference Center, so we went along. This is at a fountain in the center that has a glass ceiling above it. There are only three floors, but since the ceilings are so high on each level, the ceiling is actually the height of ten normal stories.
We went into the conference room and Oliver was SO excited to see the organ. It was fun for the kids to see the conference center in person after watching it on TV so many times. They all thought it was really neat to go inside.
Marion liked certain pieces of artwork and kept wanting to go back to them. She also wanted to ride all the escalators. Which made the tour difficult because she was NOT interested in staying with the group.
This is one of Oliver’s favorite pictures, EVER, depicting Alma baptizing people in the river.
This is a sculpture near the top of the building that is above the fountain I showed at the beginning. And a fun group shot of all of us in the mirrored wall.
There is a waterfall that comes down off the roof that the kids were really interested in. Ed was showing all the kids the water.
This is looking down at the fountain and Elora said, “It feels like there are butterflies moving in my tummy, and my feet feel funny.” I got a really big feeling of vertigo too, which is weird because it happens even though neither of us felt scared.
I have toured the conference center before, but never the roof, so I was really excited to get to go out into the gardens of the roof of the building. Marion loved all the water and almost fell into multiple fountains. Here is our tour group!
Elora loved the view of the city.
The kids were excited to see the Salt Lake Temple because that is where Chris and I were married. It was cute to see how happy they were to go to the place where we first became a family.
And it was fun to watch Chris try to toss the big kids. I am not sure he will be able to much longer, they are growing up so fast.
Elora liked this statue a lot and wanted to pose with it.
Marion usually only wants to hold my hand and be with me, and she was quite tired and crabby this day because we had done so much the day before and I think she was tired. Much to my surprise she ended up walking on this wall and holding hands with Ed! And for the remainder of the day she stayed by his side. It was sweet to see how much she loved him, and also nice for her to have a friend besides me!
Elora loved Helene and enjoyed walking around and shopping with her. I think she felt very grown up when she got to walk around with Helene.
While hanging out in Foot Locker Marion and Oliver decided to try on some shoes. Marion liked the yellow ones best.
We walked over to the tabernacle because Oliver REALLY wanted to go inside. Another organ. This kid was having a great day! We got to walk up a lot closer to this one.
Look at that cute baby! He likes to walk around and play (and was excited to be out of the stroller).
Before driving home we went to the visitor’s center on Temple Square which has some really fun displays that Oliver enjoyed and also beautiful views of the temple.
Here is a really intricate model of the inside of the Salt Lake Temple, which was really cool to see. Finally we headed back to the car so we could make the five hour drive home. It was a short, full trip, but really fun. I would love to go back up north and spend more time exploring with the kids sometime. It was also great to see friends! We found out they were heading south to Arizona a few days later so we invited them to come stay with us so we could show them Zion. The kids were happy that they would get to have a few more days with their new friends!
