Kirtland, Lake Erie, and the Fire Station house

The next stop on our sadly-out-of-order church history trip was Kirtland! I was excited to see Kirtland because of the historical sites which our church had just this very year acquired! (There were some in Nauvoo, but the main one I knew about was the Kirtland Temple!) I had never been there before so I don't know what really changed with the change of ownership. I've heard from most people that the Community of Christ did a wonderful job taking care of the sites and giving informative tours. So maybe it made not much difference. But it did seem a happy thing to me, to visit these places and know they are "ours" again and we can have missionaries there!

It was a long drive from Nauvoo to Kirtland. Surprisingly long. We left early in the morning again, Sam drove us all day, and we arrived at dinnertime. But this rental house was a nice place to arrive to because it was an old Fire Station! I was so pleased to find it because I knew how much Ziggy and Gus would like it. The owner is a retired fire fighter and he had restored it and decorated it so lovingly!

The beds were all in one room, where the firemen slept too I assume—just a sort of big bunk room. That was fun and different!

I loved this little call center or dispatch area set up in the kitchen, with maps and directories and an old-fashioned phone. And even my name written on the white board under "Officer in Charge."

Fireman gnome on the doorbell

But best of all were the toys!

The owners had gathered so many fun things. Fire engines and fire stations and hats and coats and boots and ladders and even a toy fire extinguisher! The boys were SO happy with it all! It was sad, really, that we only had one night there!

Clementine was happy too.

(You may notice, in these pictures, a rather prominent tooth in Zig's smile. It is a baby tooth being pushed out by another tooth…but it doesn't fall out! We keep telling him to wiggle it. If I was made of sterner stuff, I would pull it out myself—my mom certainly would have—but I just can't! So it just stays there, protruding. I suppose it lends a certain boyish charm? haha)

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Sunday morning as we were getting ready for church (and everyone had taken a shower except Malachi…sorry, Malachi), we suddenly lost all water in the house. We were panicking a little trying to figure out if we'd ruined something, but then we went outside and saw water gushing down the street. Some utility workers outside said that a water main had broken nearby. So that seemed like a fitting end to our stay at the fire station!

When we got to the house on the Saturday night, I looked at the map and saw that we were just a few blocks from Lake Erie! Being…ahem…a little fuzzy on my Great Lakes geography, I hadn't even realized the city would be so close to a Great Lake, let alone our house! So, leaving Sam getting some well-deserved sleep and Ziggy happily playing with fire truck toys, we went over to the lake to see if we could find a beach. And we did! 

I loved the lake. It looked just like an ocean, vast and endless. It didn't smell quite right for an ocean. We wondered if we would have been able to tell, had we come upon it and without knowing where we were?

Abe happened to call from Utah right then, so I sat on a log on the shore and talked to him on the phone while the kids waded and skipped rocks. Teddy is becoming an expert rock-skipper! It was so beautiful and peaceful. The perfect place to sit and unwind after a long day of driving.

Gus was so cute and happy hurling rocks in. I think he thought he was skipping them. But he…wasn't.

The sunset just got prettier and prettier as the light turned pink. It's rare for us to ever get to see the sun actually set over the horizon. It gets so big and red!

The rocks on the shore were really cool. They were all layered like this, almost like mica (except they weren't soft and flaky like mica). But they looked like they could be split into flat layers like that.

Such a pretty, pretty night. And now I want to go back to Lake Erie!

We went to church in the Lorain, Ohio ward (the ward was great, so welcoming that we almost wished we were going to stay there!) and then drove in to Kirtland. Luckily most of the sites are open on Sundays! The sister missionaries gave us such a good tour of the sites in Historic Nauvoo. We got to visit the Whitney Store (where Joseph and Emma lived too for a year), the ashery, the sawmill, and the Joseph and Emma Smith home. It was AMAZING to be in those places and feel the spirit there. The sisters did such a good job of telling us the significance of these sites! And they let Ziggy and Gus hold the keys to unlock the different houses, which made them friends for life. :)

The store is filled with all the same things that would have been sold there, authentic to the era. I loved the variety of items you could have found.

Here is the little kitchen where Emma fed her family.

The long oven to the left of the fireplace would hold 12 loaves of bread! I wish I could cook that many at once! I suppose Emma was often having to feed a crowd, too.

This is the upper room at the Whitney Store where the School of the Prophets took place and many revelations were received, including the Word of Wisdom. Some of the men in the School of the Prophets saw a vision of Jesus Christ and God the Father here in this very room. I was almost overwhelmed by the spirit in this room as the missionaries told us about it. It truly felt like a holy place, almost like a temple. I was not expecting to have such an experience here!

The sawmill. The mechanism for sawing logs into boards was ingenious! I can't believe how smart the people are who came up with these things!

Brigham Young helped make the pulpit for the Kirtland Temple in this sawmill. This is how it would have looked early in the process.

After Historic Kirtland, we went over to the Kirtland Temple, quite nearby. Another house where Joseph and Emma lived is by the temple. We got to see inside it and have an interesting tour from some Senior Missionaries. We loved the tiny little replica of the hymnbook Emma Smith compiled!

There is also a graveyard just next to the temple, which I always think has such nice symbolism. Because of Jesus Christ and our temple covenants with Him, these people will live again and can be sealed to their families forever!

Daisy next to one of the original windows from the Kirtland Temple

The Kirtland Temple is the site of so many sacred and miraculous events, it's hard to even comprehend them all. I loved this picture of Jesus Christ appearing on the pulpit of the temple to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. The sister missionaries' tour here sounded a little more "memorized" than the others we had (I'm sure they were new and learning it the best they could; I don't blame them, but it was a shame because it distracted a little from the feeling of the place) but the events they told about were so vast and significant, I'm sure anyone would have a hard time doing justice to them!

Sitting in the pews of the assembly room (some of these were added later by the Community of Christ, who used this building for worship and gathering until quite recently). We got to sing "The Spirit of God" while we sat here and it was powerful! (Even if we did get started off several notes too low and sound rather comical as we tried sing in the bass register…)

The beautiful assembly room

Daisy by the pulpit where Jesus Christ appeared!

What an amazing place to visit!

Pretty temple grounds. Ziggy tried to catch a bee by the flowers, succeeded, and (predictably) got stung by it. (Not pictured!) So he had gone off crying by this point. He was pretty brave, though, and felt better by the time he got to the car. 

Junipers

I'm so glad we got to go here and feel even more strongly how much our pioneer predecessors did to establish the church in these latter days!