Trip to the Midwest!

Sorry, this is a bit long...

I'm finally getting around to blogging about our trip to the midwest!! man, it has taken me forever! We flew on Sunday afternoon and arrived in St. Louis around 6ish their time. St Louis is a pretty cool place. We went to find somewhere to eat the next morning (monday) and we walked past this door:

Oh wait, it says it's not a door... okay, WHATEVER. Just because it says "This is not a door" does not mean that it's not, who are they kidding? My question is, who's the bright person who decided to put this instead of a good old "Do not enter"? Maybe they just knew it would bring someone a memory and a VERY good laugh. We laughed for days about this.

After we found the best place to eat breakfast ever (ok, it wasn't that great, but delicious still), we went and saw St. Louis' famous Gateway Arch!! It is near 630 ft. tall (I could be wrong on the exact number...) It was so cool to see, what a cool thing to build. The pictures do not do it justice, I was almost as tall as one of those "little" bricks at the bottom, if that give some scale... :D

After seeing this, we got in the car and drove all the way up to Nauvoo! It was such a neat experience. I absolutely loved it. The great thing also was that we were pretty much the only ones there and got basically all the tours to ourselves! It was awesome. The missionaries are so great and they have such good testimonies, I'm grateful for all the ones that I heard on my trip! Nauvoo was so cool, and if I posted all my pictures on here, you'd all get bored, so I picked a few of my favorite. This is the family in the Nauvoo Groves. It was hard to get a good picture because the camera had to be so far away (it was on another bridge about 50 feet away), but I thought it was a cute place to do it!

We went to a place in Nauvoo called the monument to women, it's way cool, and has TONS of statues of different stages in people's lives. Me and manda were pretending to be statues before we took this picture!

With a replicated Sunstone outside the Zion Mercantile shop (which has AMAZING stuffed breadsticks, p.s.)

We did baptisms for the dead at the Nauvoo temple. It was so beautiful, I absolutely loved it there. It was the only day that we also had clear skies, so it was a great day to take some pictures. This is me after doing baptisms (don't criticize my hair too much...). It's such a beautiful temple, and I feel so blessed to have been able to do baptisms in it! They even let us walk up the spiral staircase since we never had seen it, gorgeous!

After we left Nauvoo, we drove down to carthage to see the jail. It was a great experience to be in the place where the prophet was martyred and feel of the spirit that was there.

We then drove to Springfield Illinois, the next morning we went to the Lincoln museum. That was a cool place! The exhibits were so professionally done and it was way cool to learn about his life and time as our nation's president! Most of the exhibits had people in it that looked like this:

Oh! how could I almost forget?! We went to the HuHot TWICE! And it was oh-so-delicious!!

See: that looks delicious, my mouth is watering just looking at it!!

it was a great, awesome, wonderful, marvelous trip! I'm so glad that I got to go! thanks mom and dad for going with us!