KC, MO

Curtis and I outside the Kansas City, MO temple

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to go to the open house for the new Kansas City, Missouri temple with two of my aunts and some family friends. It was a very good experience. Our reservation was for 7:45 in the morning so the original plan was to go up the night before and stay in a hotel so we could get up bright and early and go to the temple. Well, we did go the night before, it just didn't turn out quite how we planned it. Every hotel in Kansas City was booked, thanks to Nascar, so we didn't have anywhere to sleep. We ended up leaving at 2:30 in the morning so that we could get there on time. It was such a long car ride because Curtis and I were exhausted. Neither of us is any good at sleeping in a car, so we were dragging when we got there. We ended up getting to the temple about an hour early because we didn't hit any traffic. The upside to this was that they let us go through with an earlier group so we didn't have to wait until our reservation. Even at that early hour the place was packed! The volunteers working there told us that because of so much interest they had to extend the open house an extra week and they were expecting over 240,000 people to tour the temple during the open house period. The first part of the tour was a video in the stake center next to the temple (I should just mention that the stake center itself was beautiful, it even had a courtyard). The video talked about the history of the church, particularly in the Kansas and Missouri area. I thought it was really neat when they said that the first stake in Kansas was organized in Wichita in 1962, which was one year before my grandparents joined the church. After the video, we walked over to the temple to tour it. We put plastic covers over our shoes to protect the carpet and then we were able to enter. It was so beautiful! The design was so intricate. One of my favorite features was right at the front desk. Behind the desk is a stained glass window depicting the tree of life. It was really neat. All of the wood was beautiful dark wood and the chandeliers were amazing! I don't even have the words to describe how beautiful it was!

The front desk

I am so glad that I had the opportunity to attend the temple open house. Even though the temple is in Missouri and we aren't even in that temple district (OKC is closer), it still feels like it's "our" temple. It was such a wonderful experience.