EFY in Nauvoo

Originally, I was planning on going to EFY at MU. But, with the way my summer schedule turned out, I had to choose a different location. The next closest location was in Nauvoo, Illinois which was a special edition (aka $100 more expensive).

But, backing up a few weeks before, I had commented on a picture on Instagram about which session I was going to. Another girl replied to my comment and said she was going to the second session of Nauvoo too.

Flash forward to when me and roommates were sitting in our room during some free time. I decided to go back and look to see if I had seen or met the girl from Instagram. I found that I had not only met her, but that she was sitting right across the room from me. She was my roommate!

Instead of staying on a college campus like most EFY session do, we stayed in the Nauvoo Family Inn. I shared a hotel room with 6 other girls. We ate breakfast (waffle supreme as seen above) in the hotel dinning room and our other meals down the street in the nearby stake center about a half a mile away. Many of our other activities were held at the stake center so we did a lot of walking. Yes, we walked everywhere except for the day that we did some touring and used tour buses.

I drove to Nauvoo and back with our family friend Kim. I put a lot of hours on my driving permit that way. We got there a little early so we ate lunch at a sandwich shop. Then I headed back over to the hotel to check in. Many of the counselors were there greeting everyone. As I stood in line, one counselor was making an effort to say hello to as many people as possible. He seemed very familiar. In fact, I knew I had met him before. But where? When he got to me, I asked him if he had been a counselor at the KU EFY that I had went to the previous summer. No, that's not where I knew him from. After a few minutes, we finally figured out that he had severed part of his mission in my ward two years before!

I met one of my roommates while I was signing in so we walked to our room together. We met our other roommates and settled in. Then we met our counselors and the other kids in our group. Turns out Jake, the counselor that I'd met before, was going to be one of my counselors.

Here are pictures of the majority of the people in my company. Counselors above, roommates and company friends below.

So, basically what "special edition" means is: we go with the flow because we don't actually really know what todays schedule looks like. Because we weren't on a college campus like most sessions, there had to be changes to the usual schedule due to the special opportunities we had in Nauvoo. I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail on this entire event, mostly because I can't remember the day to day schedule, which might be refreshing compared to some of my looong posts. If you want to read a more detailed post about EFY, this is my post from last year.

 During the opening orientation, they showed us a video clip of Jimmer Fredette, who they met in the airport.

On the second day, we did a little touring of the town. We walked through a grove of trees, went to the family living center, the Browning home & gun shop, and blacksmith shop.

That night we had game night which we played in the field in front of the temple. One of the games was stick pull. All four of my counselors observed Tuck in Tuesday.

 Each company came up with their cheers and performed them for the judges. The first one here is my company's and the other video is the top four finalists.

We had pizza night before bed.

The third day was spiritual day (which is usually on Thursday). The main activity was going to the temple for baptisms.

The fourth day was spent touring some more but we had tour buses this time. We went to an old cemetery, Carthage Jail and a few more sites in town.

We also spent some time on the Mississippi River.

The last day was a little more relaxed.

The variety show is always a favorite event. This session had some pretty fun talents.

  One of my roommates convinced our entire company to do something. We didn't tell the boys what we were doing until auditions and just told them to follow along to add to the comedy. One of the boys does ballet so his flexibility ended up being pretty useful. 

Sorry that there was basically no detail in this post. I guess a simple recap every once in awhile is OK. To finish, here is a compilation of random videos I took of my company and counselors. It'll give you a taste of what it was like to hang out with this cool group of people.