What a weekend!!!

Man, conference weekend just plain FLEW by and I'm telling you right now that I'm not going to be able to get the whole thing blogged about in just one sitting. So I'm going to try and break it up into manageable chunks. We'll see how it goes. First, I think I'll tell you about one of my favorite parts that truly without fail it needs it's very own post.

The Tour of the Tabernacle

My mom was nice enough to arrange a tour of the old tabernacle. Apparently the Young Women's presidency got to go on a tour little while back and since then my mom wanted to take the whole fam. She got her opportunity this weekend seeing everyone was in town from their respective state. I think I liked it so much because I find it amazing that most of the church buildings around temple square resemble the likeness of an iceberg. We normally only get to see the tip but underneath the surface there is a whole lot more we never know exists.


As most of you know the organ at the tabernacle is a spectacle in itself. If I remember right there are over 11,000 pipes that need to be fed air from somewhere. The air is all pumped from this room, where a few MASSIVE pumps are housed to supply all the air that is soon turned into music.



The whole fam. My sister and her kids were in town from Connecticut and my bro with his wife was in from North Carolina. Fun times.



This is Alex Dalman, she was a sister missionary in my mission (probably the only one I truly liked). She and her husband Leigh, along with their cute son Josh came up from Sydney, Australia for a little tour around America. They actually started in New York and did all the church sites until they got to Missouri. Then they flew to Salt Lake for Conference weekend. Kimmi's mom was nice enough to let them stay at her house while they were here. Alex is a very well trained opera singer who led our mission choir that I was a part of. Her dream is to sing in the Mo tab so we gave her a sneak preview and made her sing a verse of "God be with you till we meet again" while we were in the tabernacle. She did an awesome job and she even had some tourists sitting in the pews as an audience.




This is actually inside the roof of the tabernacle. They wanted to show us the old architecture of this place. It was amazing to hear about the old techniques that the builders took to build this place. As you can see a lot of steel has been added to help keep it stable in the event of an earthquake.



This is a spare pulpit housed once again in the depths of the tabernacle. It has two major uses. First, the general authorities can come down to this room where its all hooked up with cameras, teleprompters, etc. in order to practice their talk. Another use is that in the event of a threat on the conference center the general authorities could carry on with general conference and give their talks in a safe location without any interruption.



This is one of three really cool organs they have under the tabernacle. These rooms are used as places to practice as well as a place for Mack Wilberg to come and compose his music. Very cool organ even though I wouldn't know the difference between a good organ or a bad organ if it hit me in the face.