Frogley Summer Tour - Day 8
Day 8: Ripley, NY to Richmond, IN
This morning we all slept in. I knew that would likely cause
a late night and some other timeline issues, but we all needed more sleep. We
got up around 8am, folded and rolled the laundry I washed last night, packed
the car, and loaded up. We stopped for gas right on the NY/PA border, and
bought Subway breakfast flatbreads from the gas station around 10am. They were
really good.
When we arrived in Kirtland about 2 hours later, we missed the turn into the Newel K Whitney store (Everything there has totally changed since I went 18 years ago!), so we went to the Kirtland Temple first and got a picture.
Big, fat raindrops started falling just as we were loading back in the car, and by the time we got to the Kirtland Visitor’s Center the rain was REALLY coming down. Thankfully we had an umbrella in our car and Dave took three trips from the car to help us all get in the Visitor’s Center. We all ended up soaked anyway. A fun little mini-adventure.
After watching a short video in the Visitor’s Center we borrowed some church-owned umbrellas to walk around with, and took a tour with Sister Davis, a missionary from our new stake in Orem, who will be returning home in just a few weeks. The Kirtland historic site is so different from what it was like when I was there before, but it was still amazing. Possibly better.
The Ashery
The Sawmill
The Store and upstairs apartment
An hour southeast of Kirtland is Hiram, OH, where the John Johnson farm is, and where Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered. This site was very similar to what I remembered, and it has a very special spirit. It was also a cool history lesson and so interesting to see what types of space were important to families at the time. It was also cool to learn that when the Johnson’s sold their farm and Sister Johnson’s dream home to help fund the Kirtland Temple, the family who bought it lived in the house and worked the land for 4 generations. They also didn’t do a lot of updating or renovating, so most of the house is original, and was easy for the Church to purchase and restore for tours.
Our tour guide at the John Johnson farm was Sister Natalie
Howe from Logan, and she knew Christian Frogley. J
Two and a half hours southwest of Hiram is the Newark Earthworks. Sadly, by the time we made it to Newark, the museum there had been closed for three hours already, but we were able to walk into the Great Circle, take some pictures, and have a great discussion with the kids about Nephite lands and customs. I heartily believe that Newark could possibly have been the Nephite’s Bountiful, and possibly the temple site where Christ came to visit the Nephites after his Resurrection.
We picked up Wendy’s for dinner across the street from the
Earthworks, then turned west. Another 2 ½ hours and we finally arrived at our
deluxe KOA cabin for the night. This one has smaller/fewer sleeping spaces than
our last cabin, but it has a full kitchen and bathroom. The proportions remind
me a lot of the tiny-house designs I’ve looked at, and I love the size of the
bedrooms and bathrooms. If the main room were a bit larger, and there were more
bedrooms (the only kid room can only sleep two kids), I could totally live in a
place like this. J
Though I do miss my awesome house in Orem. Our trip is already half over. In
some ways this trip is going really fast, and in other ways it is dragging on
and on. J
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