Day 8 - Copan, Honduras – June 15th

We left our hotel at 7:00 this morning and drove to Quirigua. It is a city that Joseph Smith said was a Book of Mormon city. Mike and I were talking, and we think that probably most of these old ruins are Book of Mormon cities, that later civilizations built upon. All the ruins are like that. They would just build new temples over the old ones, like a Russian doll. There wasn’t a lot to this place, mostly some large stela and round stones with carving on them. Joseph Smith said of these round stones, that the Book Mormon unfolds their history. We weren’t there very long, since it was a small place. But it was cool to be in there. We saw our first snake through. Someone said it was a Boa, and he wasn’t happy. He had just been hit by a machete. That’s how they trim back the grass and weeds. We then had a 4 hour drive into Honduras. Mike and I slept most of the way. I tried to read, but we were at the very back of the bus so I started feeling nauseous. I enjoy just watching the scenery. It is so different from home. We arrived at Copan around 2:00 p.m. It started to rain really hard. We went into the museum first, so we got out of the rain. In the museum, they had put several of the artifacts and steal and house fronts, to protect from the weather, and they made replicas to put on the site. We were in the museum for almost an hour. The main thing in the museum was a replica of a temple that another temple is built over. It was a burial place for kings. But they preserved it by covering it and building another temple over it. Mike and I saw the tunnels that led to it, and started to go down, but we were kicked out. Apparently you needed special tickets that we didn’t have. By the time we went out of the museum to the ruins, the rain had stopped, but everything was nice and muddy. We enjoyed the site. The lower section we walked into was a large plaza area with stela all around, a ball court and 3 altars, or pyramids. One of the pyramids had a staircase of inscriptions, about 40 steps tall and 10 feet wide. Each stone had an inscription on it and tells a story. It looked very cool. Then we went to the top section, and found an amphitheater, and the burial temple and housing complexes. We had fun exploring everything. After Copan we came to our hotel a few minutes away. We had another delicious dinner in which I ate way too much. Then I went and sat in the hot tub for about an hour with several others from our group. This hotel has free wifi, so we were able to video chat Dave and the kids again.