A few months ago, some of our young adult friends were talking about how awesome it would be to attend General Conference in person. It’s a semi-annual event, every April and October, held in Salt Lake City. Around twenty thousand Church members can attend to watch the events in person; the remaining millions watch online. It’s tricky to get tickets, because they’re so limited in number for a worldwide Church where many, many people want to attend Conference.
With the help of our bishop, we requested some tickets. The weeks passed, and to our surprise, he was able to secure eleven of them! We only needed six, so we wondered what we’d do with the other five. More on that in a bit.
Transportation was the next issue. We decided to rent a minivan so everyone could ride together. What about housing in Utah? Well, it happens we own a townhome there! Zack is living in it, but there’s plenty of room for our little group. All the hurdles had been cleared. We were off to Conference!
It’s a seven-hundred-mile drive from El Centro up to our townhome. Ugh. Along the way, we stopped for lunch in Las Vegas and introduced the ladies to Cheba Hut (the same one we’d visited on our way to California in May).
In Utah, we encountered some snow! All of our young friends grew up in the heat of the Valley, and some of them had never experienced snow in their lives. They were so excited.
As the drive wore on, we were treated to a nice sunset.
Our tickets were for the Saturday afternoon session, so we decided to make a big breakfast beforehand. Pepper and I walked over to the grocery store to pick up some food, and bumped into one of my former seminary students! Morgan was in my Longmont class way back in 2018, and amazingly we still recognized each other. Small world, right? Since we had those extra tickets, we offered three to her and her husband and sister.
We arrived early and wandered around Temple Square in the crisp spring sunshine.
The Salt Lake City Temple is still under renovation!
Eventually we made our way into the Conference Center, which was really nice. It seats a little over twenty thousand people, and it’s designed specifically for these conferences (although it serves other purposes throughout the year). We found our balcony seats and settled in.
What about our remaining two tickets? Well, we’d offered one to Zack a few weeks ago when we knew we’d have a spare, and that left one final ticket. He asked his friend Afton if she’d like to join us, and she did! It was fun to meet her.
The experience of watching General Conference in person was really cool. Obviously it’s fine to see it via internet video, but there’s a special spirit in that building. It’s amazing to be united in purpose with twenty thousand other believers (the seats were all full), and to see the Apostles and other Church leaders in the flesh.
Afterward we went to the roof and watched the grounds below. So many people!
On Sunday we drove back home… another seven hundred miles through Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and finally California. Coincidentally, we’ll be on these same roads in a little over a month when we head home from our mission.
I’m glad we were able to go. And I’m especially glad we could do it with these four amazing women who, a few months before, just had a dream of making it happen.