can you recommend a good place?

one of the things we have tried to teach our son is the importance of the temples of the Lord. perhaps his real interest began when the temple in san antonio was being built. as we live in an area close to the temple, and are in san antonio often; we made much effort to visit the temple site often in order to observe its progress from foundation to completed facility. he loves to see the temples and has 8 x 11 prints of a couple of dozen of these beautiful monuments to our desire to serve God.

a new tradition has been started in our family over the past couple of years. when we go on a vacation we make efforts to go out of our way to walk the grounds of the temples in the area we are visiting. due to lack of time and child care, we aren't generally able to enter the temple for worship. instead, we walk the beautifully manicured gardens of the temple and take photos of jackson with the temple in the background. occasionally all three of us are in the photo, but more often than not; it is just the little j-man. we sit for a few minutes and think about our family and why the temple is an important place to us.

last summer, we went to las vegas, nevada. we visited temples in las vegas; st. george, utah; and mesa, arizona. the mesa temple is, perhaps my favorite temple, so it was nice to be able to sit in its shadow once again. its design -reminiscent of the temple of solomon- is so classic and simple and beautiful. st. george is a fabulous building, and its place as the oldest working lds temple holds special weight with me, as well.

this summer we visited 11 temples on our way to and from salt lake city, utah. of course, the salt lake temple is the great, glorious traditional temple of the church; and, it is every bit as beautiful in person. it was a considerable disappointment that we left utah without entering this house of the Lord for education and inspiration.

here are the temples we visited this last week. i've included pictures with some of them:

-monticello, utah
-provo, utah
-mount timpanogos, utah
-jordan river, utah
-salt lake city, utah
-bountiful, utah
-ogden, utah
-logan, utah
-manti, utah
-albuquerque, new mexico
-lubbock, texas

it won't get any better than this; and it will never be this good again. i hope jackson isn't too disappointed next year with only 3 or 4 temples in the rotation.