Hill Cumorah Pageant

A week and a half ago, we got to go to the Hill Cumorah Pageant as a family with the young men on youth night in our ward. Joshua also volunteered with parking the next day. It was a lot of fun! The pageant is a dramatization of scenes throughout the Book of Mormon ending with Joseph Smith finding the gold plates in the Hill Cumorah and the restoration of the Church from there. It started at dusk, which fell around 9pm and lasted until about 10:30pm. Surprisingly, the kids did very well staying up late, but were asleep pretty much as soon as they had their seatbelts buckled on the drive home.

Before the pageant began, the cast (over 700 members) mingled with people attending the event. I thought it was really neat to see close-ups of lots of the characters. Above in the first picture the kids are standing by Sariah and grandchildren, and in the second with one of the wise men attending Jesus' birth. The cast came from everywhere; some families would make it into a vacation/family tradition to be a part of the pageant every year. They would come a week early to participate in rehearsals, and then perform for the following week and a half. Most camped out in an area by the hill that they called "Zion's Camp."

You can kind of see the set in this picture--we saw youth groups from surrounding areas building it as part of their youth conferences a month ago.

The special effects were pretty elaborate--they had fires, waterfalls, lights, and other cool props for the different scenes. We were glad to be able to see it during our time here in New York.

Washington, D.C.

Last weekend, we took a trip down to Washington, D.C. for Independence Day--about a seven hour drive for us from Syracuse. We met up with my brother Ryan (coming from Florida) and stayed with my cousin Brent and his family. We've never been to the Capital, and it was a great trip! We drove down Friday night and left Monday afternoon.

On Saturday we went to the National Mall--a national park in the middle of the city that houses the Capitol building, some other government offices, many historic monuments, and a lot of museums. This shot is the Capitol building from the rear.

Library of Congress

National Museum of Natural History

Washington Monument and Reflecting Pool

White House

Lincoln Memorial

The kids loved the U.S. Botanic Garden--I did too, it was so neat to see all the different plants. In the children's area there were tools for kids to dig around and fountains to water the flowers with.

That evening, after seeing the sights, we settled on the Capitol lawn to listen to a dress rehearsal of the Independence Day concert. Among those that showed up to perform (some weren't there) were David Archuleta and Lang Lang (the pianist). It was a lot of fun to spend time with Ryan and also Brent and his family.

On Sunday night we went to a patch of grass near the Pentagon to watch the Independence Day fireworks over the Capitol. Monday we drove around to see a few monuments we'd missed on Saturday and celebrated Lucy's (Brent's daughter) birthday, and then left for home that afternoon. A great trip!