A Third Visit [April 14, 2001]

Our early visits to Winter Quarters all seem to have been because of our daughter Rachael. We had flown to Kansas City on April 6, 2001, to accompany her and the young man who ultimately became her husband as they each received their endowment in the St. Louis Missouri Temple on Saturday, April 7, 2001—the 86th anniversary of my father’s birth. Robert had been baptized and confirmed a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just over a year earlier.

We had anticipated Robert would talk to us about marrying Rachael. We all knew it was looming on the horizon, but by the time we returned home to Utah on Sunday he had not done so. The following Tuesday, just two days later, Robert asked Rachael to marry him.

On Thursday, two days later, we were back on a plane once again flying to Kansas City. (Rachael worked for an airline and was able to get us almost free fares if we were willing to endure stand-by flights from Salt Lake City to St. Louis to Kansas City and vice versa.)

And another two days later, on Saturday, April 14, we attended the final day of the Winter Quarters Nebraska Temple open house. I wrote in my journal at the time:

“This morning we drove in caravan with a lot of the people from Rachael’s and Robert’s singles branch up to Omaha to go through the last day of the Winter Quarters Nebraska Temple open house. It is a gorgeous temple with a definite pioneer theme. After we had gone through the temple and while we were eating refreshments on the grounds of the Mormon Trail Center, we ran into Kevin and Jody Taylor, who were up from Kansas to go through the open house. Incredible that we would run into them among the thousands of people who were there! Kevin grew up in Bountiful as one of our next-door neighbors. We also saw Ross Williams and his wife. Ross had been our bishop in Rose Park many years ago.”

We absolutely fell in love with this lovely little temple that was built as a House of the Lord in tribute to the faithful pioneers of the nineteenth century whose sacrifices and lives hallowed the ground upon which it now stands. Little could we foresee then what an integral part of our lives this temple would become more than a decade later.