Waite's Window: Saturday travels Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio stops in Kirtland and Hiram along the way

Saturday August 1, 2015

So we had some excitement this morning. The front desk called Mom and Dad’s room and said there had been an incident with our green van and U-Haul. Dad went down to talk to them and it turns out that the friendly guy from last night caught some guy trying to steal our bikes. We have three bikes tied to the back of our van and the guy had cut the ropes and was trying to take the bikes over a fence. He left the bikes behind when he was confronted, but he got away. Funny story: they found four bikes instead of three. We think one of them was the thief’s bike.

Anyway, I didn’t find out about all this until we went to breakfast. We got up about 8 again. Lydia didn’t want to get dressed this morning. She went down to breakfast in the pajamas, but she finally got dressed after we went back to our room. The rooms were on the 6th floor and the younger kids really enjoyed riding the elevator. Everyone from MaryAnne down wanted a turn to push the buttons.

Today was not nearly as long as yesterday. First off we drove to Kirtland. It took us about 30 minutes. Kirtland was really cool. The first place we stopped was the Kirtland Temple. They charged $3 per person for tours, so we just walked through the visitor center and around the outside of the Temple. We also walked through a historic cemetery that was across the street. We saw the names of lots of early saints there including Thankful Pratt and Joseph and Emma Smith’s infant twins.

Then we planned to go to the Church’s visitor center, but we took a wrong turn ended up out of town in the middle of tons of trees. We turned around using a little road that led off into the trees and headed back into town. At the visitor’s center we went on a 45 minute walking tour of some historical buildings in Kirtland. Our first stop was the Newell K Whitney store, one of the first places Joseph Smith went in Kirtland. There was a ledger in the store with actual transactions from back then. It was really interesting. I looked and Joseph Smith had nearly four full pages. The store is the original building and even though it seemed small to us it would’ve been considered a large store in 1837.

The next stop was the Whitney home across the street. It was an adorable house. After the Whitney house we went to the Johnson Inn. This belonged to the same Johnson’s that lived at the Johnson Farm. When they were asked to sell their house and farm they moved into Kirtland. There aren’t any pictures of the inside of the Inn, so it has been turned into an Information Center. There were short videos about the Church and a map of Kirtland; stuff like that.

The last stop of the tour was a sawmill and an ashery. The sawmill was pretty basic, put I was surprised that the wheel could be turned by such a small amount of water. I had never even heard of an ashery before. It was owned by Newell Whitney and apparently it was a very valuable source of income. He bought peoples’ fireplace ashes and they did some stuff to it and was able to resale them for a lot more. That was the end of our tour.

Before heading out of Kirtland we stopped at the first visitor’s center again and Emma bought a t-shirt that says Kirtland Temple. After that we drove to Hiram to visit the Johnson Farm. Dad has a lot of good memories of the Farm from his mission, so he really liked going back. The drive between Kirtland and Hiram took about 45 minutes and I’m pretty sure almost everyone fell asleep. The Johnson house was cool; we toured the house and the missionaries told stories of things that happened there. We ate lunch in the parking lot after the tour of the Johnson Farm. We had sandwiches and chips.
We saw two temples in one day today. We stopped and saw the Columbus, Ohio Temple. I love to see all the temples as we go across the country. We have a temple wall in one room back in the house in Powell. It has pictures of all the temples mom and dad have been to. They will get to add several pictures after this year.

After we got on the road again we watched National Treasure. For dinner we stopped at KFC. I haven’t had KFC in forever because we don’t have one in Powell or Cody. It was delicious. The kids ran a little crazy in the restaurant, probably because they had been cooped up so long. Regardless it was fun. We stopped to eat before we finished the movie, so we continued watching when we got back in the car.

We got to the motel a lot earlier tonight; it was about 7:45. We have three rooms tonight; Julia, Emma, Lydia, and I are in one room. MaryAnne is in with Mom and Dad and the boys are in the third room. We are going to bed a little earlier tonight. This is our last night in hotels; tomorrow we will be in our new house in Virginia!

Miles: 500?