Day 9 – Wyland Wall, Temple Square and the Great Salt Lake

We stayed at Walmart last night in Richfield, Utah. I thought they were going to have a tornado, there was a storm brewing above the mountains and the wind was whipping around like crazy. The wind really blew the camper, but it didn’t last very long and everything was good.

We took a scenic route to Salt Lake City and our first stop was the Wyland Wall that was on the side of a furniture store building.

We then went to Temple Square. It was a little hard to find a parking spot for the camper, but found one about 8 blocks away and then walked to the square. It was a pretty amazing place. We couldn’t go in the temple, they reserve that for weddings and baptisms. They told us that they can have up to 100 weddings a day in the temple during June.

There was a lady that stopped and talked to us outside the temple, she gave us a brochure of the square and told us about all the neat things to see. There were two visitor’s center that they had at the square. Each one had different things in it.

This is the second visitor center we went in, which focused more on the building of the temple. They had a replica of the temple in there, along with interactive monitors that told you more about each section of the temple.

This is what the inside of the temple looks like.

 

This was the baptism area. We at first thought it was a milking parlor or something (I know, don’t laugh) but the cows actually held up the baptism tank. I am sure there was some symbolism there, but I didn’t really catch it.

We then went up in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, which was celebrating its 100 year anniversary of being built. It was a beautiful building also. We ate lunch on the top floor.

We then toured the Beehive house, where Brigham Young lived with his wife, Lucy. There were tour guide who took us through the house.

I really liked the woodwork in the house.  The beehive is the state symbol.

We then went to the Church Office building, which was 26 stories tall. We went up to the 26^th floor where they have an observation tower. My pictures didn’t turn out so great from that.

 

We also had a tour guide that took us up to the elevator and pointed out all the sites to us on the observation deck. There were two decks on the observation tower on each side of the building. The lady told us about some guys that they had left on the observation deck “who said they were taking pictures” and they parachuted off the top of the building. I want to look that up, can’t imagine doing that.

From there we went to Antelope Island on the Great Salt Lake. We drove 7 miles on a causeway that they had built to get to Antelope Island. There wasn’t really a lot to see and they said the gnats were really bad and biting so we didn’t even bother to get out. We saw a lot of buffalos.