Going west - tunefully

Salt Lake City delighted us ... once we recovered from driving on its freeways! All the 'Interstates ', and many other freeways, have a 75 miles per hour speed limit - that's 120 kilometres per hour - and they stick carefully to that limit. Not so in Utah - the signs say 75mph, but the drivers use that merely as a starting point ...whew! It was a relief to find ourselves in the city streets, and to drive to our hotel in Temple Square.
Our main aim in going to Salt Lake City was to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in rehearsal, at the Tabernacle, which was two minutes' walk from our hotel. The doors were due to open, so we walked across at ten to eight, only to be greeted by the news that the choir wasn't rehearsing there that evening! Apparently they were rehearsing for a festival this weekend at the Catholic cathedral of the Madeleine, and were practising there, with no visitors allowed. You can imagine how disappointed we were (Frances has dreamt of this for almost half a century!!!), but fortunately a kind "Elder" took pity on us, and suggested that we should just quietly attend the rehearsal anyway. This we did, after a frantic rush to get the car keys, the car, and finally an almost-impossible-to-find parking spot ... and it was wonderful! Imagine more than 350 singers, a full orchestra, and a huge pipe organ, in a beautiful cathedral, decorated with superb murals ... and then imagine the music, everything from St Matthew's Passion to negro spirituals - WOW!
We were able to visit the Tabernacle at lunchtime the next day, this time to attend a half-hour demonstration of the organ - that too was a superb experience! The Tabernacle looks like a huge boiled egg - oval, with a completely curved roof, and it has superb acoustics - we were given a demonstration of how we could literally hear a pin drop, and a piece of paper tear, from more than 100 feet away, and even John (who's deafer than a beetle) could hear it!
We filled the morning in by visiting the Family History Library - five floors of family history information, in addition to the Family Search records, available on computer, but stored in an underground vault in the Granite Mountains north of the city. Most libraries are fairly impersonal, but this one was populated by eager (almost over-eager) volunteers, willing to help you through every step. To John's delight we managed to find a book with the records of his great-great-grandparents (the Labuddas) arriving as emigrants from Germany to New York, in 1873, along with 5 children, including his great-grandmother. Family lore told us that they had gone to America, disliked it, returned to Germany, then emigrated to Queensland, but there was no proof - and now there is!
We left SLC after lunch, drove across salt flats to Bonneville and Wendover ... and today we've driven 434 miles (695 km), right across Nevada ... tomorrow we head into California ... and the sun is shining! We've been surrounded by snowy mountains all day, but the temperature has been in the 60s F - that's in the 20sC ... it's wonderful.