Our 9th Wedding Anniversary trip

June 22nd was our 9th wedding anniversary and we had our first weekend vacation away from the kids.  Curtis's sister was kind enough to watch our kids for us.  We were able to fly down to Salt Lake City for free because of our business card reward points and we took the bus and tracks to stay in my grandparent's condo and do things around downtown Salt Lake.  We had a great time!  It was nice to be able to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted.  Here are some pictures from our trip.

We went to the Clarke Planetarium on Friday after we arrived where all the stuff we saw was free.  This is a picture of a telescope that is in space.

This was a fun contraption that had to do with Newton's law (I think).  It had all these little balls going around inside.  There are little knobs you can pull on the outside to help them do something.  It was big too as you can see!

I got the whole world in my hands!

Curtis is on Mars!

Duh...duh....duh duh....Deedra's first steps on the Moon!

Now a visit to the conference center and a tour.

Beautiful view from the top of the conference center.

Next we went to the top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.  What a wonderful view!

Sunday afternoon we visited the church museum right across the street from Temple Square.  Imagine having to travel in this instead of our nice comfortable cars.

This is a replica of the lower deck of a ship that pioneers came from England in.  Our family of 5 would have had to share ONE of those beds because there just wasn't room.  And I'm not talking about one whole bunk, but just one of the beds.  Depending on the size of your family you would either get 1 or 2 beds but that's it.

A model of the ship the early saints would travel on to come to America.

The death masks of Joseph and Hyrum Smith.

Gives you an idea how big the Angel Moroni is on top of each temple.

Did you catch us at the last General Conference?  hehe

This model is at one of the visitor's centers on Temple Square and shows you what the inside of the Salt Lake Temple looks like.  We did a Saturday morning session at the temple so we were in some of those rooms but I always wondered what else was in there.  So awesome to see now!

Here's a closer look.

And this was taken from the airplane on our flight home.  I never realized so many crop fields were shaped in circles.  Sure was neat to see.

Well, we didn't get pictures of everything we did.  Here's a quick run down of what I can remember.  Friday the 24th of June we arrived in Salt Lake, looked around at the Gateway Mall, visited the Planetarium, went to the Gateway theater and watched the new X-Men movie, ate at Tuscano's for the first time (a Brazilian restaurant), then back to the condo.  Saturday morning we went through a session at the Salt Lake Temple, ate lunch at the Lion House Pantry Restaurant, toured the Beehive house, toured the Conference Center, went back to the Gateway Mall, ate some delicious pizza at Sborro's, then back to the condo to do some swimming and hot tub on the roof (we were lucky no one else was up there because it was crowded the night before), and then watched one of our movies we brought.  Sunday we went to Sacrament meeting at the Joseph Smith building, came back and watched church programs on TV and napped, did some laundry, then out to see the church history museum.  We tried to surprise my aunt at the conference center who gives tours but they had left before we got there.  We then went to the visitor's centers on Temple Square, and then back to the condo again to pack up.  Monday morning we woke very early (4:50am) to do last minute clean up and get to the bus stop on time so that we wouldn't miss our flight home.  It was a great weekend and great trip!