A day trip to Twin Falls

The Twin Falls Idaho Temple was dedicated on Sunday, August 24, 2008, by President Thomas S. Monson. It was the 128th operating temple in the Church, the fourth in the state of Idaho.

In July I had gone to the Twin Falls open house with Michael, Shauna, and their four oldest children, eleven-year-old Meghan, ten-year-old Caleb, eight-year-old Jacob, and five-year-old Andrew. The eighteen-month-old twins—Ethan and Marta—were home with Grandma Claudia. The temple was the first stop on our vacation to the Pacific Northwest.

I had described the open house in my journal: "At the open house we started in the adjacent stake center, where we received a brief orientation and watched a short video about the purpose of temples and the history of the Church in the Twin Falls area. Then tour guides took us through the temple. At the front entrance into the temple they had us put plastic foot coverings over our shoes (so as not to unduly soil the carpets throughout the temple).

"We proceeded through the entry and waiting areas to the baptistry in the rear part of the temple. We explained to the children why the baptismal font is placed on the backs of twelve oxen, following the pattern used in Solomon's Temple anciently as recorded in the Old Testament, the oxen representing the twelve tribes of Israel.

"We then walked up a staircase to the upper level, where we walked through the women's dressing room, the bride's dressing room, the ordinance rooms used for the endowment (the one we were in had a gorgeous mural showing the Shoshone Falls on the Snake River), the celestial room, and a sealing room. One of the nice touches was use of a symbolized version of the Idaho state flower, the syringa or mock orange, throughout the temple in the woodwork, the windows, in designs in the carpets, etc."

A couple months later, sometime in the fall, my sister Jackie and her son Jared were down from Boise for a wedding. They stayed overnight at our house in Bountiful. During her visit, Jackie and I got talking about the new temple in Twin Falls. We thought it would be nice to meet sometime in Twin Falls to do an endowment session together. The temple was, after all, more or less in the middle between Boise and Bountiful and wouldn't be too bad a drive for any of us—less than two hours for the Idaho family, less than three hours for the Utah family.

The idea stuck in the back of my mind. I let winter pass so we wouldn't have to concern ourselves with navigating treacherous roads through the mountains and desolate stretches of northern Utah and southern Idaho. Finally, on the final weekend of April, I phoned Jackie to remind her of the idea and laid out some dates in May or June that would work for us. We ended up picking the very next weekend, Saturday, May 2. She agreed to check with other family members in the Boise area, and I agreed to check with people in Utah.

Within a day or two we had eight family members committed to going: my brother Dale and his wife LeAnn from Nampa, my sister Jackie and her daughter Jolene from Boise, Claudia and I from Bountiful, and our daughter Mary and her husband from Salt Lake. Endowment sessions in Twin Falls are by appointment only, so I called the temple and gave the names to the sweet sister who answered the phone. There were some maybes along the way, possibly my brother Lyle from Parma and my brother Gene from Nampa.

Sessions began every two hours. We picked the session at 3:30 in the afternoon, hoping that would not be too late in the day for everyone. That would give us time to drive there after dealing with some commitments we already had that morning. It turned out to be an ideal time for everyone. Jolene had to work until 11:00. Dale and LeAnn worked in the Boise Temple every Saturday morning and completed their assignments at 11:00. Mary was running in a 5K race in Clearfield at 9:00. Perfect. We were all set.

Saturday morning, May 2, 2009, dawned bright and early. Well, it didn't exactly dawn, and it wasn't exactly bright. It was dark and dreary. The nighttime dark gradually became the daytime dark. The entire state of Utah, according to weather reports, was blanketed with dark clouds, and a heavy rain was falling. Snow was expected in elevations higher than 8,000 feet or 9,000 feet, depending on which forecast we listened to, but the road from here to Idaho didn't go anywhere near that high.

Mary phoned. She was still going to run her race in the rain, but Vince had to work, they had just learned, so they were bowing out of our little day trip.

Claudia and I left Bountiful about a quarter after eleven. The rain was heavy, the roads were wet, and the flow of traffic on the freeway was slower than normal. I stayed five to ten miles an hour under the posted speed limit all along through Davis, Weber, and Box Elder counties. As we approached Snowville, in the northwestern corner of the state, the rain finally stopped, and the roads were pretty much dry the rest of the way across southern Idaho.

Even with the weather and our slower pace, we had made good time, so we decided to stop at Burley to grab a bite of something to eat. We stopped at a Burger King and ordered grilled chicken sandwiches and small lemonades.

After lunch we got back on the freeway and headed the final half hour to Twin Falls. Dale called to see where we were, and I told him we were about 25 miles east of Twin Falls. The four of them—Dale, LeAnn, Jackie, and Jolene—had just arrived from Boise and were waiting for us in the temple parking lot. We would have arrived at about the same time had we not stopped to eat lunch.

We pulled into the parking lot, found a close vacant spot, parked, and called to see where they were. Two cars away, just beyond the car parked right next to us.

We entered the lovely temple and were directed to the dressing rooms, where we changed into our white clothing, and then were directed to the endowment room, the one with the lovely mural of Shoshone Falls. It was nice to be in the temple with family members we do not normally get to associate with. Dale and I were serving as proxies for two brothers, sons of the same parents, born in Denmark in the late 1800s. I served for the older brother, Dale for the younger.

After we finished at the temple, we left Jackie's car in the temple parking lot and all rode together in our minivan the few miles to the Shoshone Falls. Jackie had heard on the news that this was the ideal time of year to visit the falls. The water level was at its highest, with the normal spring runoff, bolstered by all the recent rains, and before they started diverting water upstream for agricultural uses.

Sometimes called the "Niagara of the West," the falls are 212 feet high (some 50 feet higher than Niagara Falls) and flow over a rim 900 feet wide. It was an impressive sight.

We concluded our mini-reunion by eating at Carino's, an Italian restaurant in Twin Falls before one car headed west and north the 130 miles to Boise and the other car headed east and south the 215 miles to Bountiful. It had been a nice day.