I'm BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

Boy, what a weekend!

If you didn't already recognize the picture, it's the Salt Lake Temple. I got to see it in person when we went to the Conference Center in Salt Lake City.

But, let's start back at the beginning...

Okay, first of all, what I said about Miner's (yes, I misspelled it) Burgers is wrong, it's in Yakima. And those burgers were BIG, too. Not only that, but I got a pistachio shake on the side (pistachio is one of my favorite ice cream flavors). Needless to say, I didn't finish it.

Okay, so we finally crossed the Idaho/Utah border at 8 or 9 in the AM, and I had only had a couple of hours of sleep (I normally don't fall asleep in the car) and we drove down to Provo, home of Brigham Young University!

We went to the Gordon B. Hinckley Visitor Center, where we got to just look at all the exhibits (pretty cool, actually) and then we watched a video on how BYU came to be (also cool).

Then we got a tour around the campus, and boy oh boy is it a big one. One thing I really thought was cool on the tour was this structure called the "tree of wisdom", which, depending on which angle you look at it from, can be right side up, or upside down:

Then we had lunch at the food court: WHOA, this place is huge! They had a bunch of different restaurants and everything, and I got a FREE T-SHIRT.

So later that evening, we went to a Brazilian steakhouse. What they do here is they serve you all kinds of meat, and keep coming to the table with those dishes, and we take a piece off of the kabob and eat it. We got a wooden cylinder-shaped thing that had a red end and green end. If the green end was up, they kept coming to us with more food. When the red end was up, they stopped coming. Overall, it was fun.

Then we went to the Friday night BYU volleyball game. Now, one of the coolest things happened before the game even started. They prayed. How many other universities say a prayer before a game?

Unfortunately, they lost, but it was to the best team in the nation, and on the other hand, they had just played each other the night before, and BYU won, so no big deal.

Finally, we got up Saturday morning (we stayed at our Bishop's sister's house) to watch the first session of General Conference on TV. We took notes on what all the speakers said (I'll explain a little more in my next post). I was once again wowed by the sheer size of the crowd, the choir, etc... but that "wow" would get even bigger soon.

We packed up and drove up to Salt Lake City (which looked like a smaller, much nicer version of Tacoma), where we stood in line inside Temple Square for a while to get our tickets. Even though the weather wasn't good (gray skies), the whole atmosphere felt good: people were singing hymns outside, most people were dressed nicely, and the air smelled cleaner than in Tacoma. But one thing that kinda got to me were protestors outside the conference center, who were holding signs that were going against the Mormon church. This kinda made me feel a little less safe, but it was only a minority of the people.

We didn't make it in for the second session, and had to watch it in the Temple Square Theatre one block away. But when priesthood session came, we got our tickets and headed inside. We had to wait a LONG time inside, too, and I almost lost my journal in the men's bathroom (thank goodness I got 'em back!). But we soon made it in, and:

It was a whole 'nother ball game actually being INSIDE the conference center during conference. Don't worry though, I wasn't too wowed not to pay any attention to what was happening center stage. But really, wow.

This time we stayed at our Bishop's brother's house (our Bishop seems to have quite a bit of family here in Utah), and had Papa John's pizza for dinner (we bought like 6-7 pizzas, I think, and we ate almost all of them).

On our last day, we basically got up, had breakfast, drove back to Temple Square, but we watched the second-to-last session in the tabernacle this time. After that, it was time to take the big 12-hour trek back to Tacoma, Washington...

I got home at 1 in the morning, and was dead tired. The front door was locked, so I had to call our home phone to wake Dad up so he could open the door for me. After that, I brushed my teeth, got in my PJ's and hit the wall.

...

Yeah, like I said, it was SOME weekend. But it's good to be home!