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Very mounTainous

Posted on Aug 10, 2010 by | 0 comments

Thursday was a day filled with preparation.  Not having a day-job makes getting ready for trip pretty easy.  When Jacob got off work I was practically standing by the door with the keys in my hand.  Jacob, on the other hand, mulled around.
“Did you grab my phone-charger?”
“Yes.”
“How about my church shoes, I can’t find them.”
“They are packed, honey.”
It was cute at first but then I was tired of playing that game so I just shoved him in the car and muttered something about trust.  But to be honest, I’m pretty stoked that I didn’t forget something huge. Woot!

We drove to Vermont to the closest concentration of hotels south of the Joseph Smith Birthplace, White River Junction.  When we arrived at our hotel around 9 pm we noticed a pizza joint and a putt-putt place right next door.  We had been sitting for too long so we played a round.

The place was deserted.  No really, we had to go into the pizza place and beg to play.  Although the grounds were empty we were kept company by tiki torches and spiders.  We even played a few holes in the dark because they weren’t all properly lit.  It was classy, for sure.  And as usual, Jacob killed me on the long game but his putts could use some work, he is a genuine Happy Gilmore minus the anger issues.
In the morning we hunted down the Birthplace Memorial.  We didn’t actually get lost but we had no directions and apparently “LDS Lane”, the road of the address is too small for our poor GPS to know what was going on.  But we have natural hound dog skills and found the adorable mormon campground, church and museum tucked up on the very hill where the prophet was born.

We had a lovely tour from a senior missionary through the little museum.  I learned a little about the prophet and his parents.  Then the missionary began telling us about the memorial itself and the dedicated man who designed it and eventually built it.  The single piece of granite is 38.5 feet tall (one foot for every year of the prophet’s life) and is completely flawless.  I think just the obelisk weights some 60 tons.  It took some 20 horses aided by oxen via pulleys to move the thing!  And today it would be too heavy to use the roads to move it.  Crazy. Impressive.

I’m very grateful for the stories and testimony of the missionary but it was the spirit of the landmark that I enjoyed the most.  It was a wonderful way to start our trip on a peaceful and reverent hill in Vermont.

We took off for the boarder but made a pit stop for lunch in Montpelier.  What a tiny “city”!  We exchanged some cash we had for what the teller informed us was the last of the town’s canadian moo-lah.  We filled up and before we knew it we were waiting in line to visit our friends to the north a.k.a. Canada.

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