Lessons Learned

A couple of quick lessons that we learned while in New York.

Whenever walking anywhere in Manhattan, your destination is always 12 blocks away :) Even Jonathan can tell you that. . .

As the above illustrates, distance is relative. In New York, we like to call their measurement of distance, "the country mile". The country mile is quite different from the actual mile. It equates to about 5-15 miles actually. We found this out in trying to find a restaurant to eat. When you are looking for them in northern New York, they are nowhere to be found. But the minute you stop looking, they appear everywhere. During one of the searching moments, we asked a nice lady at the outlet malls we had stopped at where a good restaurant was. She told us about a nice place close by called Abigail's, and gave us directions. Her close by ended up being about 30 minutes away. But we found it nevertheless, and the food was good.


Final lesson. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints doesn't do anything small in terms of tourism. You never need question where an important church history site is located. As we were driving along the Susquehanna River we were wanting to find the place where the Priesthood was Restored and where Joseph Smith and Olive Cowdery were first baptised. We stopped in a small town, not knowing where to go. Mom and Dad didn't have cell coverage and went to a pay phone to try and phone the local missionaries or someone that could tell us the location. Only Shannon had cell phone service. She called her family, but no-one answered. Michael called a friend to have him look it up on the internet. While he was doing that, Mom finally asked the clerk at the gas station if she knew where it was. Funny thing, asking directions . . . locals can usually be pretty helpful. I don't know what took us so long! We started driving down the road, worried we may have passed it, that "country mile" you know. We were about to turn back, when Ta-Da, a huge sign appeared before us, announcing the site of the Restoration of the Priesthood. I didn't get a picture of that sign, but as we went to different sites, and noticed the well laid out directions the church gives to each place, we found it entertaining and got a picture of one of them. . .