Tripping around North America

As I mentioned in my introduction, my wife Susan and I have been on a month-long holiday in the US and Canada. I thought I'd give a few of the highlights which relate to skepticism that we encountered on our trip.

Firstly, we visited Salt Lake City in Utah. As most will know, this is the Mormon capital of the world - the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. LDS for short.

The reason for the visit to Salt Lake City was that it was the location of a technical conference I was attending, and also the location of a scrapbooking conference which Susan was going to attend. So, the encounters with Mormons were quite incidental to our journey's purpose. But, there's lots to see.

Unfortunately, the main LDS temple was under major renovation, so was surrounded by scaffolding. This had been going on for three years, with a further three years of construction work to go.

We did take a wander into Temple Square though, where we got to interact with some young missionary women. They appear in pairs, and are always conservatively dressed, with long dresses and conservatively-styled hair. The conversations we had were quite stilted - I'm guessing they usually struggle to make conversation with strangers, but they were all very nice and interested to hear that we were visiting from New Zealand. I did overhear some people asking the young missionary women if they'd seen The Book of Mormon - the musical that pokes fun at the church. They said they hadn't, but it did give me a bit of a giggle at the question.

We wandered into one of the smaller temples to take a look around. As a musician I'm always interested in seeing the magnificent pipe organs they have. They did not disappoint! There was also a free organ recital that took place each lunchtime, so we availed ourselves of that. I was impressed by the lack of proselytisation. The conference centre is quite amazing, and is used only a couple of times a year for their general conferences. It's an impressively large venue, which seats 21,000 people. It also had an organ recital which we could listen to.

We also visited the LDS Family History Center, which is a place where you can go to search for family history. It was quite an odd experience. The building itself was quite large, consisting of multiple levels. We made our way down to a lower level where we took a seat at a computer workstation, of which there were many. We were asked where we were from, and they then put us into a queue where we got to have personal assistance from a LDS volunteer that would help us navigate online searches to find out information about our family.

It all felt a bit creepy, with a bunch of older people, who were very nice, but seemingly there for a “make work” situation. Anyway, the person I was assigned commented that they didn't get many people from New Zealand that would come in to do a search. But anyway, he showed me how to search on the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs website to search for my grandparents' marriage and the births of my relatives. The irony was not lost on me that I'd travelled all the way to Salt Lake City to be shown how to navigate a New Zealand-based website! I did manage to locate the births of some of my relatives, though it's only possible to search for births more than one hundred years ago, so that meant that I couldn't find my father (he was born in 1930). It did reveal that my grandmother had a stillbirth - something that was unknown to other members of my family.

After a brief off-hand comment to Susan Gerbic (who is going to be attending our conference in November in Dunedin), that we were going to be holidaying in North America, she hooked me up with Shane Smith, of the Beehive Skeptics in Utah. The great thing about the Beehive Skeptics is their acronym - BS!

Now, I was quite surprised by the name - what do beehives have to do with Utah? Well it turns out that Utah is known as the Beehive State. There are a ton of businesses and signs in the state that have a beehive symbol on them. But, Utah isn't known for its bees. It turns out that there are various allusions that led to the moniker. The Bible talks about the land of milk and honey. There were no honeybees in the ancient Middle East, but it is thought that the honey referred to in the Bible refers to date honey, which is an extract of dates. As confused as that is, it seems that one of the books in the Book of Mormon refers to a miraculous 344 day voyage across the ocean to North America where the honeybees were introduced. The honeybees also have allusions to cooperative work - and I heard it described as the Mormon workers being like honeybees - being quiet, industrious workers.

The symbol that is used for the hive actually shows a bee skep, which is a traditional “hive” that was used by beekeepers. It was a structure made out of straw or dried grass to contain captured bees. The bees would then make their honey and beeswax inside their new hive. Here in New Zealand, and around the rest of the world, the Langstroth hive is the modern way of keeping bees.

So, we met up with Shane, and spent a few hours with him. We took a walk up a beautiful canyon just a few minutes from the city centre, but also he showed us around the extremely odd Gilgal Sculpture Garden. The place is situated in a suburban backyard, and you can just freely wander around it. It contains a bunch of sculptures, including The Sphinx, many of which contain religious symbolism or references to passages in The Book of Mormon. It was created by a single man - Thomas Child - starting in 1945 when he was 57.

It was great to meet Shane, and we had a few discussions about how to promote skepticism and what activities could be done. He's currently running pub-based meetups, and running some sort of challenge to dowsers. Anyway, it was great to meet him and chat about skeptical topics. He also said that for all of the conservatism of the LDS church, that Salt Lake City itself is actually quite liberal. We were quite impressed to see all the pride flags on display, and other evidence of its liberal leanings. If you're ever in Utah, I'm sure that Shane would be pleased to meet up with other like-minded skeptics. He has a Facebook page where you can connect.

After our first visit to Salt Lake City we were off to Vancouver for a few nights, and then back to Salt Lake again for Susan's conference. Well, actually, her conference got cancelled due to lack of people registering. This was the Close to my Heart (CTMH) scrapbooking MLM that you would have read that Mark joined for a lark.

Since a few people from afar had made travel plans that couldn't be cancelled (mainly Australians and Kiwis) the company held a one-day VIP session, which Susan enjoyed. I got to deliver her, and some other fellow Kiwis to the CTMH headquarters in Pleasant Grove, which was about a 30 minute drive from downtown Salt Lake City. As we've discussed before, a lot of MLMs have their headquarters in Utah. It would seem that I'd gone to the centre of it all, delivering Susan and her friends to an impressive building that housed some of the operation. And, just across the road was a large doTerra building (the MLM that sells essential oils, making some big health claims) - so yes, MLM central.

I later learned that the founder of CTMH actually owned around 30 acres of land in the area that the headquarters is now situated on. It would appear that she made a good deal of money selling off plots of land to other MLM operations!

After Salt Lake City we headed to Canada, landing in Calgary. This was our second stop where we met with local skeptics. Again, Susan Gerbic hooked us up - this time with Adrienne Hill and her husband Greg. Adrienne is an avid skeptic, and is involved with Susan Gerbic's Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) efforts and also appears on The Skeptic Zone podcast, out of Australia.

Adrienne set up a Skeptics in the Pub meetup in Calgary where we were joined for dinner by about six other skeptics. It was a really nice time, and great to connect with others.

The following day we commenced the main purpose of our trip to Canada - picking up a rental RV and beginning our two week trip through the Canadian Rockies. Driving a large vehicle on the “wrong” side of the road was a bit of a challenge, but I quickly got the hang of it. Much of our driving was initially on large highways so little issue with being confused about the side of the road to drive on. Anyway, I managed to make the 3,500 kilometre trip all the way back to Vancouver with the only incident being collecting a road cone on the last day of the trip.

The Rockies were truly spectacular. Amazingly beautiful scenery, and, for us, some novel wildlife we'd not see in New Zealand. We saw some black bears on the side of the road, as well as some deer, and numerous squirrels and chipmunks (I still can't easily tell the difference!)

Along the way we also saw reference to Sasquatch, which is the Canadian version of Bigfoot. They seem to take Sasquatch quite seriously, with various statues around the place, though I'm sure it's mostly tongue-in-cheek, and there are few that believe that they're a real creature.

The bizarrest experience I had though was related to our RV. The RV had a gas water heater which gave us hot water for washing dishes, and showering in the RV (though we quickly learned that it was better to use the showers at the campgrounds - generally more room and it avoided filling our grey-water tank). But, the hot water heater just wasn't reliable. It was basically a computer controlled electronic ignition system that would ignite the gas, and try again if it didn't start, then give up after three tries. We got on the phone to the support people and they got us to take it to a service place in Jasper. Unfortunately, the people there weren't very helpful, as, of course, it worked fine when they looked at it. So we continued on the road, with the unreliable heating. We then arrived in Revelstoke, where we were hooked up with a local service person named Alvin (the chipmunk!)

Well, Alvin was quite a character - a little guy in his 60s who'd been working on RVs for years. He and I discussed the problem and did a little trouble-shooting, trying to figure out what the problem could be. Anyway, he reset all the systems, and cleaned out the gas pipe with a brush - suspecting that there was probably a spider web inside the pipe that was restricting the gas flow and causing the unreliable operation. This all seemed quite reasonable, but then he started relating other stories about how the RVs could talk to him and guide him to the problems. He seemed pretty certain in his own mind that this was happening - that the vehicles literally had some “inner ghost” that could give him tips as to where the problem lay.

This took me back to my childhood, where Sunday mornings were spent listening to the radio when they'd play kids' story content. A popular story was Sparky and the Talking Train, where a kid called Sparky could “talk” to the trains, and at one critical point, a train on which he was riding told him about a fault that could have derailed the train.

The adult, skeptical, me recognises that Sparky was hearing audio pareidolia.

Anyway, Alvin got our hot water service fixed and we had no further problems. He was also nice enough to let Susan wander around his backyard, picking berries off the bushes for a nice snack. (That was also an amazing part of Canada to me - who'd not been before - that you could just wander through the woods and snack on raspberries, and other types. Delicious! But that's what the bears eat, so naturally they're available to humans too, but it was a bit of a shock after growing up in New Zealand and being told never to eat the berries in the bush because many of them are poisonous)

I'll leave it there. I don't want to bore readers with too much detail of our trip. Nevertheless, it was very relaxing and we got to have a lot of new experiences and I got to take a ton of photos. We also got to taste Poutine on a number of occasions and agreed that it's overrated (though maybe them's fighting words to Bronwyn!)