Drive to Indiana: Day 2

Day 2: Aug 13, Sidney, NE to Des Moines, IA

Day 2 started off with breakfast at Perkins

then a walk through Cabela’s world headquarters.

With all of these...

there were a lot of these.

We stopped in Omaha, NE to visit the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters. The first thing you notice when you get there is not the visitors center, the cemetery or the beautiful temple. These three things you can barely see because of the thick trees. The first thing you notice is the sound of the Cicadas. Because of the thick trees, there are a ton. They’re big. And they’re noisey. Luckily for me, they keep to the trees, but as we were driving up to the visitor’s center you could hear them from inside the car. I thought it was a lawn mower or weed wacker or something. Yikes! I thought we had a video of the noise recorded, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.

But once you get passed the buzzing…the visitor’s center is really nice. There’s a video you can watch about the pioneers and some of their journal entries, which I only got to watch half because Ashlyn had a small breakdown. Then there’s a a small “museum” that you could walk through. There was a full size wagon and ox team (wagons were smaller than I thought, and the ox way bigger.) There’s a 3-D map laid out to show where the saints had all lived in comparison to where the graveyard and the temple was. Unfortunately the only thing remaining of the saints time there is the graveyard. By the time we got out of the visitor’s center it was too dark to see much of the graves. But the monument up there is beautiful, naming many of the saints that are buried there, most of which were children.

The temple is just to the south of the graveyard. Its not a large one, but it is beautiful. (We only got to see it in the dark, but still pretty. Of course…what temples aren’t pretty?)

We got into our hotel at Des Moine, IA, and ordered some pizza for dinner, went down to the pool and tried to get Ashlyn to stick her feet in…but no go. I hadn’t realized that I booked a room with two double beds (not queens) so Justin and I both got our own, and slept like babies. Ashlyn slept pretty well too. She must have been tired: