Nauvoo

I keep thinking that I will be better at this blogging thing, and I am not! We just continue with our life from day to day. We still really love it here in Wisconsin.
We recently took our first trip to Nauvoo. My mom and my sister's family were going to be there and so we decided to go down there for one night and spend time with them. I forgot my camera, but my sister said she would send some pictures that she took. I'll post those later. It was so fun to see some of my family.
It should only take about 4 hours to drive to Nauvoo. Well, it took us nine. We left at 6:30 in the morning so that we could get another full day in Nauvoo. We were only staying one night and thought that we would make the most of our time. We were about an hour and a half away from Nauvoo when we thought that we would go straight to Carthage and do that first before we went to Nauvoo. We didn't have the exact address and so we just put "Carthage, IL" in our GPS. We didn't know this but, THERE ARE TWO CARTHAGE, IL!! The time of arrival was really close and we knew that the Carthage we wanted to go to was close to Nauvoo, so we thought nothing of it. The GPS took us back an hour and half the opposite way we wanted to go! When we got to the place that the GPS said was Carthage, we were in the middle of nowhere! It was a cross roads with farm land on each of the four corners. We knew that it wasn't a big community, but we thought we should see some sort of sign of a city. We continued driving for about 15 minutes and came to a town called Dixon. We went to the local Library and looked up the actual address of the Carthage Jail and then put it in our GPS, IT WAS THREE HOURS AWAY in the opposite direction that we were going!!! This was around lunch time and so we went to a park and made our lunch and let the kids play a little bit. We continued on our way and got to Nauvoo at 3:30 in the afternoon.We had to get to Nauvoo to pick up tickets for the show that was later that night. We were supposed to pick up our 16 tickets by 2:00p.m. and there was no way that we were going to be able to do that. We don't have a cell phone and so all I could do was say a prayer that they wouldn't give our tickets away. I got to the Visitor's Center and they said that they had just left a message on our home phone and were wondering if we were going to pick them up. Luckily, I got there just in time, before they would have given them to somebody else. We never found time to make it to Carthage. But, we had a good time while we were there and my kids got a new perspective for the trials that the early saints had to endure and how they lived day to day. When we were headed back home the next night, we were in a torrential thunder and lightning storm that had tornado warnings everywhere. It was the scariest drive home that I ever have experienced!
I am grateful that we were able to go and enjoy most of the parts of Nauvoo. I was getting homesick for my mom and it was fun to see her along with my sister's family. All of the kids got a long really well. Living so close to Nauvoo, I am sure we will make it back again and see the other stuff that we didn't get time to do.