Our New England Trip

At the end of August Ben and I went to New England to check out Grad Schools (mostly Boston University), tour around, and to do a little work for the church. We had a blast seeing New England! First up on our trip was Yale and some work for the church. New Haven, Yale campus especially, is beautiful. Ben was in their special collections library most of the time looking for correspondence or journal entries about Joseph Smith and more specifically anything mentioned about the translation of the Book of Mormon in some collections there. He didn't find what he was hoping for but he did have a fun find, well a few fun finds, but one significant find. This one in particular was a letter from 1825 that mentions Joseph and how he had confessed his sins in a public meeting not too long before the letter was written. Confessing sins in a public service was not out of the ordinary back then. Ben reported on it to his bosses and gave them the copy when we got back. They were excited. If this is talking about "our Joseph," (there was another Joseph Smith in the area) which they now have to confirm, this would be one of the earliest documents on him. Cool beans! huh!

While Ben was in finding neat things at the Beinecke Library I got to walk around New Haven and the Yale campus. I even got to go on a tour and see the inside of a few buildings. What a neat place!

From New Haven we drove up to Lexington and Concord. We saw Waldon Pond (even went wading in it), Emerson's House, the Sleepy Hallow Cemetery, the Minute Man Statute where "the shot heard round the world" was fired, and some very old but nicely kept houses (the oldest was built in 1658 if I remember correctly).

We finally made it back to Boston. We met with one professor who is very nice and helpful at Boston University and a few other people there to get info on getting in and what programs they have to help grad students with funding. Unfortunately the professor that Ben wants to study under confused his calenders and didn't make our appointment. But hopefully Ben will get to know him next fall. After our morning of checking out BU we went and walked the freedom trail. It was so fun to see and read about all that history.

The next day we got to spend the morning in Salem. The Salem Witch Museum was a lot of fun. It took us through the whole build up and happenings of the Witch Trials and then told us the story of witches and how they developed. Celtic midwives that knew herbs and such had their religion that worshiped mother earth. The Catholic Church moved into the land, over time gained influence, and got scared of the midwives influence so they deemed them witches and murdered them. The idea of a witch went from witches who looked like everyone else to the Wizard of OZ witch to now a mix of both thanks to Bewitched and Harry Potter. The green face witch will probably never leave as long as there is Halloween. Bless her heart. We also got to learn about Wiccans. Wicca is a nature based religion and for most Wiccans, a duotheistic religion worshiping a God and Goddess.

After Salem we had to head to the airport where we had an adventure. We forgot the holder for our GPS in the rental car so I went back on the shuttle to get it while Ben checked our bag. I got to the airport just in time to make our flight but we ran into a glitch because Ben's drivers licence had gone missing since checking the bag. They couldn't find it at the counter and we didn't see it anywhere else. So Ben tried to use his Library of Congress card, which is government issued, to get through security. They of course weren't used to that so they ran it up stairs to the boss to check it out. So Ben made it through security with a combination of his Library of Congress card, his Social Security card and a credit card just in time to miss our flight. Bummer. Luckily there was another flight we could go on that would get us to Chicago in just enough time to catch our connection flight home. Yeah!

Well, there you have it folks. So went the Park adventure in New England.