This was our first sight of the Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial when we arrived in South Royalton, Vermont, on April 5, 2008. The day we arrived Elder and Sister McKinnon, the director of this site and his wife greeted us at the monument. We had already stopped at our apartment and unloaded everything from our tightly packed car. We had only driven a couple of hours on Saturday because we had been staying at our time-share in the Birkshires in Massachusetts. It was General Conference weekend and we watched Conference at the director's residence that day as well as on Sunday. Sister McKinnon made wonderful chicken soup for dinner on Sunday.
The McKinnon's were so kind and patient with us. They insisted that we take a couple of days to do our grocery shopping and get settled.
When we started coming to the visitor's center each day we spend almost all of our time working on our dialog which took days and days. After we finally had written down what we wanted to say it took a couple of weeks for me to learn it Craig learned it much faster. It was good to have a basic idea of what we were going to say on our tours but we soon found out that the Holy Ghost is the one to really determine what is said.

This is the visitor's center where we give tours, but it is not where we spend most of our time. Things were very slow at the visitor center for several weeks after we arrived. Some days we would go the whole day without a visitor, most days we would have one or if it was a weekend we may have a few more.This was a good thing because it gave us time to practise our dialog. We also had time to read and study about Joseph Smith and Church History. I have never liked studying Church History because I thought it was just too sad. However, because I have had the time and the necessity I'm really beginning to enjoy it now.
Most of our early weeks were spent in the office in the residence. The residence looks exactly like the visitor center only flipped end over end, it is directly west of the visitor center and this picture was taken from the porch at the residence.