Meaningful Miles

A question we get asked all the time is "Where are you headed first" We have a map of all of the temples, and mark with a Gold Star each one that we've been to. We then connected the dots on the rest and created a route. I've added other neat attractions and things along the way. Here is the link to our map!

Where do I begin? For as long as I can remember I have always wanted to go to the temple. When I was a teenager the prophet of the church was Gordon B. Hinckley. He had a fire for temple work, and made a goal to have 100 temples built in the world by the year 2000. Ever since that goal of President Hinckley's, I remember having the goal of wanting to visit each and every temple that was or would ever be built. When I met Ashley, I had probably been to around 15 to 20 temples. I told her of my goal, but that I was willing to start over when we got married. Whenever we travel we have always tried to make time to visit the temple if they have one where we are or close to where we are going.   With the rate that the church is building temples, so that the members of the church can all be close to a temple, the goal started to seem insurmountable, but it's never been a goal that I thought I would accomplish quickly. It has been a great excuse to travel, which has always been a ...

We've received many reactions to our adventure plans, including: "Wow, everyone is doing that!" "We thought about doing that too, but..." "How can you afford to do that?" "You're going for how long?!?" ("I thought you'd be gone for only a month or so") "Aren't you too young for that?" We laugh as no matter what we say, many people don't really understand what we're doing. So, let me explain. We are an LDS (Mormon) couple from Utah with no kids, and three feline furbabies (Bella, Achilles, and Trouble). My husband has a goal to visit every LDS temple in the world. To give you an idea, there are currently 156 op erating temples in the world and more than a dozen more under construction, and usually a few more announced each year. At first I thought this was an unrealistic goal, despite the fact that we like to travel more than we like to buy 'toys'. By the end of fall of 2016, we ha...