Cooperstown/Lake Placid, New York.

Copperstown is known for one thing. Baseball. As the birth place of baseball, naturally the Baseball Hall of fame would be here. Everything in this town had to do with baseball. Everything. Except for the fact that Cooperstown is Rachel Ray's home town as well. I would have never guessed.

First stop, The Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Pearce, Wendi and Eric.

The boys were in heaven!

There was almost every world series ring on display. Bling. Bling.

My team, the Toronto Blue Jay's, won two World Series in a row, and maybe a third if there was no baseball strike. I was lucky to be at the game when they won the pennant. Go Blue Jays!

For lunch and dinner we ate at Rachel Ray's recommendation, Alex & Ika Restaurant. And we weren't disappointed. It was amazing food. We walked the main street and browsed thru the baseball shops.



We got Pearce a custom baseball bat.

We went to the first baseball field, the birth of baseball, Doubleday Field.

This is when the gang had to split up. Grant and Amy had to drive back to Toronto to catch their plane back to Utah. While we continued on to Lake Placid and Montreal. Living far from family we rarely get to have this much time together. We really enjoyed hanging out with Grant and Amy. Thanks for being our travel buds.

On our way out of Cooperstown. Beautiful colored trees lined the winding road, lakes and rivers all the way to Lake Placid.

Gorgeous water. But cold.

Lake Placid. Home to the 1932 and 1980 Olympic Games.

Fun on the mountain without snow!

We decided to fast forward our time in Lake Placid and drive on to our next destination, Montreal. If you noticed we will make a complete circle when we eventually head back to Toronto.

Palmyra, New York.

As birthplace of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Palmyra New York is a second Mecca for Mormons. And so it was a must see for us.

The Smith family farm.

The first Smith Family home, they built around 1818. A family of ten lived there for seven years.

The main room and kitchen.

The parent's bedroom.

In the loft where the Smith children slept.

The Fields
Across the Smith's field on the hill top now sits the Palmyra Temple.

The second Smith family home, they built in 1825, about a hundred yards from the first house.

The main Kitchen.

The dining room.

The pantry.

The second Smith family home in the middle of the trees. The barn to the right and the barrel making house to the left.

The barrel making house. This is where Joseph hid the plates from thieves.


On the path to the sacred grove, one section of the forty acre wood lot the Smith's owned.

Eric and Pearce.

In the sacred grove. Eric and Pearce.

Pearce and Wendi.

Wendi, Eric and Pearce.

Pearce finds a place to rest.

My tired boy.

In front of the Palmyra Temple.

The Hill Cumorah Pageant is performed here, outdoors for seven nights in July. The script is ten short stories taken from the Bible and the Book of Mormon. I have seen it several times as a kid and teen. It's truly magical. My parents made the pageant our reward for reading the Book of Mormon every morning as a family throughout the year.

The Memorial on Hill Cumorah.

Eric and Pearce.

We traveled back into Palmyra to visit the restored Grandin Printing Press that published the first addition of the Book of Mormon in 1830.

The restored facade of the Grandin Printing Press.

This is where the assembly began. Each and every letter was individually placed backwards. A tad more tedious than modern print shops.

The ink and press.

Pages were hung to dry.

A pulley system brought pages down to the main level for binding.

All individual pages were strung together.

Bounded pages were glued.

Leather covers were made for each book.

The fire heated the embossing tools that imposed the front of each leather cover.

Embosed and finished. They repeated this process five thousand times. Now I know why the BOM's publication is considered a miracle. Thank the the mortgage of Martin Harris's farm.

Wendi, Pearce, Eric, Grant and Amy in Grandin's book shop. Grandin did not sell any of his first addition Book of Mormons in his time. But, in 2007, one of Grandin first addition Book of Mormons were sold at auction for 108,000 dollars.

We had a great day of site seeing and were all ready to move on to our next destination...Cooperstown. We drove several hours to find this little town in the middle of no where. And why would we go to the middle of no where? Well, because the Baseball Hall of fame calls this out of the way town it's home. We pulled up to our hotel, a restored Victorian house, and crawled into bed. Pearce slept like a rock.