July was Awesome! Part 2 (finally)

The main reason for Jeanne, and Mike & his family coming to visit in July was for Josiah's Eagle Court of Honor. It was a wonderful event, and many friends came to share Josiah's special day.

However, we also planned some fun things to do as a family for the days after the Court of Honor. On the day after, we got packed up and headed north for New York. We stopped at Hershey, Pennsylvania and took the free chocolate factory tour. Mike's car still had a problem with overheating and needing coolant, but we got on our way after the tour and got to New York late that night. We were camping at a very nice campground, and we let them know we'd be arriving late. We were setting up our tents around midnight, but we finally got settled in.

The next day Jordan, Josiah, and I played with the kids at the campground, and Jon, Jeanne, Mike, and Lena went to the Nauvoo temple. That afternoon we went to see the Smith Farm, the Sacred Grove, and then went to the Hill Cumorah Pageant that night. Above are most of the family in front of the Smith home. Below is a photo of Jon and me sitting in the Sacred Grove.

The Sacred Grove is beautiful, but it is also a very quiet and reverent place. Even though there were many youth groups there, it was not noisy. I heard one or two people call out, but they were the exception. Most people seemed to feel immediately how sacred a place it is and spoke in quiet, hushed tones. It was very much like being in a temple.

We also went to see the Grandin building, where the Book of Mormon was published, after the Sacred Grove and before the Pageant. Many years ago as a young woman, I was in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, but I'd never actually gotten to see it before.

On Saturday we packed up, visited the Hill Cumorah itself, then went to the Peter Whitmer Farm. After the Whitmer Farm, we said goodbye to Mike's family, and they went to Kirtland, Ohio before returning home, while we headed south to go to our own home.

Driver's Training and Disaster Week

Despite the title of this post, the two are not related, except that they both occurred in August.

I had every intention of telling more about our wonderful July as my next post. There was Josiah's Eagle Court of Honor (the main reason for his siblings and nephews/nieces visit), our trip to the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra (New York), and the visit right after of Thalita, the Brazilian girlfriend of our son Jordan.

However, August was as busy as July was, and somehow my blog never got updated. First of all, we got Josiah signed up for Driver's Training. If he didn't take it in August, he wouldn't be able to get his license till he turned 19. Neither he nor we wanted him to wait till then. However, because I'd been waiting to sign him up till we had some free time apart from all the visitors, the only class he could get was in Springfield, which was an hour's drive each way, during rush hour in the morning, and the lunch hour when it finished, both bad traffic times for our area. The class itself was 3 hours. After the first day I took my scrapping stuff. As much as I love to read, I was much happier scrapbooking. I got a lot of pages done during those class times. The class plus the driving time to get there, however, took 5 hours out of my day. And then the next week, Behind the Wheel began in the afternoon, which took additional time out of the day, and we tried to get in practice driving in the evenings.

It was on the way to one of his Behind the Wheel classes when the first disaster struck. We were stopped at a traffic light, and suddenly the car started rocking and jiggling like we were on a moon bounce. Josiah and I both thought something really weird was wrong with the car. It didn't last long, though, and by the time the light changed to green, everything was back to normal. Josiah was the one driving to his Behind the Wheel class, so I was a little nervous the car would start acting up again while he was driving. Stopped at a light was one thing. Having it happen when he was driving would be another. It wasn't a problem, though. The car was fine. Then Jordan called and that's when we found out it had been an earthquake of 5.8 magnitude.

Now, some may wonder how we could be so dumb as to think something was wrong with the car. First of all, I've never experienced an earthquake before. Secondly, my cars have weird problems, the kind mechanics have never heard of before. Like the time when our previous minivan would suddenly switch to low gear every time I turned on the windshield wiper. The mechanic really didn't believe me on that one, but I told him to take it for a test drive and see. Sure enough, it did it to him, too. It was a computer glitch. So it wasn't that unreasonable to think it was just another weird problem with my car. I wasn't looking around me to see everyone and everything around shaking. As soon as the car started rocking, Josiah and I immediately looked at each other, and he asked, "What is happening with the car?" I had no idea. It just never occurred to us that it was an earthquake till we heard the news from Jordan.

Thankfully, our home seems unhurt, but apparently there was some superficial damage to the DC temple as a result of the earthquake, with the tips of four spires broken off. At first we just assumed that the report we heard was confusing what happened to the National Cathedral with our temple, but both buildings were damaged in our 5.8 quake. The local news media didn't see fit to report about the damage to the temple, so we heard that from other family in other states first. The Washington Monument also apparently cracked in spots near the top. If the earthquake had been longer than 30 seconds, there would have been a lot more damage. There were some aftershocks in the days following, but not strong enough to be noticed.

With the hurricane reaching our area just a few days after, most on the East Coast were feeling a bit jinxed, but our neck of the woods came through pretty well. We lost our power only for a second. Literally. Then it came back on, and we had no other power outages, thankfully. No tornadoes, either. The weather radios were quiet in the night, which was a pleasant surprise. We expected to hear alarms for flooding and tornado watches/warnings, the usual thing we get when a big hurricane comes up the coast, but not this time. We got some heavy rain and strong winds, but we got blue skies and sunshine after. It was nice to have a calm ending to Disaster Week. Not everyone was so fortunate.