Vacation - Day 1

So...time for some super exciting posts about my summer travels, more so I can remember them and look back fondly on my memories than to entertain any of my 1-2 regular readers. Right now I am on our yearly family vacation and this year we chose to do Boston/New England. Yesterday we flew into Manchester, which is in New Hampshire about an hour north of Boston. One of my favorite things about this part of the country so far = you can pass through multiple states in a shorter amount of time than you can drive from St. George to Provo. Love it. Anyway, we got into New Hampshire pretty late last night and stayed over at a hotel near the airport.


This morning we drove to Canterbury NH where there is a Shaker village. It was very interesting, much more so than I expected. Unfortunately it has been rainy pretty much all day, but still pretty warm. I am just glad it isn’t 100 degrees with this humidity. Anyway, we toured the buildings in the village and learned about the people. The weirdest thing is that they didn’t believe in marriage, so if you became a shaker after you were already married and had kids, you would suddenly become unmarried and your children would be orphans. Kind of sad. But besides that, they were very practical and were always looking for ways to improve things. I don’t know if either of those things have anything to do with it, but my brother said if I lived back in the 1800s I would be a Shaker. Rude! And the most important part of this visit of course was when we met Bob the broom-maker. Conner is now obsessed with him because, as he says, “he has a voice that would have pleased the gods themselves.” He has also referred to the voice as angelic, euphonious, beautiful, and perfect. Yeah, he is a little weirdo.

After the Shaker village we went to Sharon, Vermont to the Joseph Smith birthplace. There isn’t much there besides a visitor’s center and monument, but it was nice. Obviously the original tiny log cabin he was born in isn’t still there, but they know where it was. We didn’t do much at the birthplace, but we ended up chatting with two old man missionaries for a while. My favorite part of the conversation was when one of them found out my mission papers were in, and he asked me if I was in the MTC right now or not. What? It was confusing. I guess he thinks you can leave and go places while you are there? I don’t know.


That night we went to our hotel in Hanover, Mass. and got some dinner near the Dartmouth campus. So crazy thing-they only have like 4,000 undergrads there. That is something like a 10th of the BYU undergrad population. We got talking about this, and Harvard only has around 6,000 and Yale around 5,000 undergraduates respectively. What the heck! It really doesn’t seem like BYU has so many students, but compared to these places we have tons and tons.