The first installment of our action packed trip to the UT!

Well, we're back from our trip to Utah for Ben's sister Laurie's wedding. The tales of our adventures there will come in a few separate posts - here is day 1!

We had a really great time. From the minute our plane landed we just went, went, went, and saw and did a lot of really fun things in the one and a half non-wedding days we spent there. Fiona has started using the expression "holy cow!" (I really don't know who she got that one from!) and that pretty much sums up a lot of the things we saw and did. I've never been to Utah before and although I know people ski there I was unprepared for the incredible mountains that are everywhere you look!

We arrived around 1:30pm on Wednesday and went straight from the airport to the This is the Place Heritage Park.

The park has a lot of history of the first Utah Mormon settlers (who were led west by Brigham Young, who declared "this is the place" when he spied the Salt Lake Valley) and is a really fun step back in time to Pioneer days. There are little houses and stores where you meet and talk to people dressed as Pioneers who tell you about blacksmithing or leatherworking, or some other pioneer-y thing, and you get to have a go at making something using pioneer time tools. Here are some pictures of the things we did there...

Horse riding...

Candle making... (Andrew had made one earlier in the day, so this was old news for him ;-)

Walking on stilts...

Fiona learns an important skill... pioneer laundry!

Mountains!

Hoop and stick games!

Crawling around on the ground!

We visited this house - it was very cute! Then we read the sign outside. A Scottish immigrant lived here with his wife and NINE children. That's crazy.

We would have stayed longer but they closed, so we moved on to other things! We continued our history themed day and next up was... Temple Square!

Temple Square is the world headquarters of the LDS Church, and has all kinds of interesting things to look at. The Temple itself is a beautiful building that took 40 years to build. Here we are posing by it (sorry there's a tree in the way!).

We were given a tour of different buildings, including the Tabernacle where the world famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir practices and sings. We also had a picture taken by the Christus statue, a replica of a famous statue which lives in Copenhagen. The room it lives in is painted with a the night sky and is full of constellations and planets, and is really strikingly beautiful.

After that we were completely exhausted, so we called it a day. More fun was to be had the next day, so we needed to get home to sleep. Stay tuned for our day 2 adventures!