2025 US Trip Day 1 SLC

 Not having travelled overseas since COVID it was time to dust of the passport and make a long flight somewhere. Bindi (my sister in law) and I came up with the plan to do a church history tour in the US. So we booked our seat on the tour for May 2025 and planned our trip around that. It seemed ages ago that we booked, some time in mid 2024 and finally that day or departure arrived.

The US deemed us suitable tourists, and neither of us had any trouble getting through Border Control on our respective flights and we met up in Salt Lake City and had 5 nights at The Kimball which was just up the road for Temple Square in SLC, and ideal spot.

I enjoyed an early morning walk, I had woken up about 4am, the joys of jet lag! Out to get some melatonin, so head up the hill from our 1 bedroom apartment at The Kimball to the State Capitol Building. A very impressive building.

With lovely views. You can also see the Wasatch Mountains from nearly everywhere in the city, they look lovely with their snow capped peaks.

The McCune Mansion, just up the road from where we are staying

After breakfast we headed out on foot to explore Temple Square. This was late April, so mid spring here, the flowers were lovely, especially the tulips.

This is church headquarters

We did a tour of the Conference Centre, this is where General Conference is held each April and October

The Christus Statue

View over SLC from the roof of the Conference Centre. We got good views. There is a lot of renovation going on in Temple Square, a fair bit has reopened so we were lucky.

Inside the Tabernacle- home of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, formerly the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

This was the Assembly Building, this was one of my favourite buildings on Temple Square

 There are lots of recently installed statues around Temple Square, this was just one of them.

The  Salt Lake Temple is undergoing extensive restoration and renovation, is due to be open in 2027

We needed a little nap after lunch, so then to to try and keep ourselves awake we headed out to do some shopping. We managed a visit to Costco, Walmart and Trader Joe's. I think Trader Joe's was my favourite grocery store- you could buy healthy stuff there! I also loved their bags, I had been looking for a Walmart bag similar to this but they didn't have them. One thing off my shopping list-they are a solid box type bag that fold up. I brought 3 in the end to bring home!