Nauvoo and the stinky cheese van

Cousins at the pumpkin patch! Trent & Sandy have five children, we have our five, and cousin
Lukas (front row right) is Samantha's son.

Watching the Nauvoo Halloween Parade. It lasted exactly five minutes!

The Willard Richards Inn. This is the original home of the apostle, and the location where Joseph and Hyrum's bodies were cleaned and prepared after their deaths. It was also the

place where the twelve held meetings. The original wine cellar in the basement (build after

the Saints left Nauvoo) has an original piece of the sunstone from the Nauvoo temple.

This is an exciting and beautiful temple to visit. It is exciting because it was built to exactness

like the original. It towers over the small town of Nauvoo and is a beacon over the Mississippi river.

This past weekend we drove 15 hours each way for a 24 hour family reunion in Nauvoo! Since the last reunion ended up with a family member in prison, we had low expectations coming into it. Our kids crammed into the van and I realized that Garrett is a very large person with long legs and huge feet that like to reach up from the back seat and tickle the people in the front seat!

We were saved by the laptop with movies. We drove through five states to get to Illinois. Becca said "Are we in Illannoyed yet?" Yep - that about summed it up for all of us! Madison drove for a while while Rhett yelled up corrections on her driving from the far back seat until Madison was in tears, and I was yelling at Rhett. On the way home, everyone had gas as a result of the chili cookoff we had eaten the day before. At first it was "Okay...that was just nasty...who did that.... WHO was that?... somebody better own up...." then after several hours, when a "fluff" would go off, we opened the windows in unison and quietly waited for the chilly wind to fumigate the van, not saying a word.

On a higher plane of thought, the Willard Richard's Inn, that Rhett's brother Trent owned until a few weeks ago, was beautiful, and we had the entire Inn rented to our family for the weekend. We could come and go as we wanted, and the families with children stayed at a nearby home that allowed children. Rhett's three sisters, two of his brothers, his mother, dad and his dad's wife Betty stayed at the Inn. It was really good to sit and talk, to tour beautiful Nauvoo, and to take the cousins to the pumpkin patch. I can't think of anyplace in the United States where you can learn so much about life in the 1840s where kind senior missionaries bring that era and it's history to life. Our kids were really thrilled with the whole "hands-on pioneer experience. Rhett and his mother went through the temple together, and she enjoyed having some time with him before his deployment. I joked with Rhett's sisters from California, who came dressed to the nines in their winter designer clothes, shoes, and sunglasses. They looked beautiful, but were WAY overdressed for Nauvoo. I think that no matter how fragmented a family becomes, in this case because of divorce, there is still so much love and common ground to be found.