Shopping and Spiritual Matters

Today was three things: driving to Salt Lake City, visiting Temple Square, and shopping.

Before you start imagining that the wife dragged me along while she shopped on this big outdoorsy vacation, let me set you right: it was me. So far this trip I've managed to loose three things: my fav Tilley hat (bought in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada); my fav Maui Jim wire frame sunglasses (bought in St. Martin), and one of the feet from my Gitzo tripod (bought somewhere on the Internet). I ordered replacements for the Gitzo feet and Tilley hat from Amazon, and had them delivered here to the hotel in SLC. They were waiting when we got here. I lost the sunglasses yesterday; they fell out of my pocket when I was shooting the Mormon Row barns. We stopped in Jackson on the way down here from Grand Teton and I bought new ones.

Peery Hotel Room 335, May 2012

The drive down was one of our longer ones and we actually got "lost" at one point, despite having GPS in the car. How, you ask? Well, some genius decided that US 89 and WY 89 should intersect at some point, and the GPS lady was yelling "Take Route 89" at me. I took the wrong one. It added about 20 minutes to our trip.

Anyway, we got here, the hotel is great ($109 for a huge room a few blocks from Temple Square), and we went out to have a look.

Megachurch, May 2012

The Church offers docents to guide you around the Square, which is a walled compound that is their headquarters. We were escorted by two young ladies, one from Korea and the other from the Ukraine. As proselytizers, they were pretty inexperienced, so they really didn't even annoy me too much. But they did show us a few interesting things, although you're not allowed inside the mother Temple.

Religion being the theme of the day (after shopping), we found this plaque on the outside of our hotel:

Plaque, May 2012

Who knew that SLC was such a hotbed of Judaism as well as Mormonism? The plaque is right outside the hotel bar.

You heard a couple of days ago that the hat was an offering to the fire gods in Yellowstone. And the sunglasses were lost photographing an old Mormon settlement. If I can just figure out a religious link to loosing the tripod foot, this really is a religious-themed day. Maybe I lost it on the Sabbath? I have a 42% chance ...