As some of my readers will know, my family and I are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka the Mormons). Explains the 6 kids, right? 🙂
As part of our trip to Europe, we realized we’d be in London over Sunday, leaving on a 2:40pm flight out of Heathrow
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- How I got us 16 extra hours in Rome... for FREE!
- Where I "wasted" my 2 IHG free night certificates
- Great customer service by the London Hilton on Park Lane
- Boston Airport Air France lounge review
- Do you go to church while you're on vacation? I do
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Given that we’d need to spend an hour to get out to Heathrow, plus 2 hours to navigate the airport and go through security, we knew we wouldn’t have time to do a ton of regular sightseeing, we decided we wanted to go to church.
Church on Vacation
I know some people don’t go to church while on vacation, and while I would say I’m not a 100% stickler about it, I think unless it was super inconvenient, we try to make a concerted effort to go to church even while we’re on vacation. We went to church in Idaho Falls, Idaho while we were at Yellowstone this summer, and today’s church was the Hyde Park 2nd Ward in central London
It was the same as it ever was! Boring high council speaker, returned missionary speaker, sustainings and releasings, even if we did sing the “wrong” While of These Emblems we Partake 🙂
I like to say one of my favorite things about going to church on vacation is the fact that the wi-fi password is the same in all the buildings around the world! An important part of a church to me is the sense of the community, and walking into the church and having my phone start “buzzing” is like the church’s way of saying “Welcome back Brother Miller”
Enjoy the #sundayselfie I took on
Here are a couple of other church pics from various trips.
Church in Stockholm, Sweden in 2017. Church was in Swedish (of course), though they did have a couple of missionaries that were translating into English for people like us. Though I eventually took off the headsets because while they were trying very hard, the translation was pretty bad. The speaker would talk for a long time, and then you’d get like 3 words of English. I figured “hey, I’ve been to enough Sacrament Meetings that I get the gist of what is going on :-D”
My son and I in Athens in 2018
The family in Barcelona in 2019
Church in Honolulu in 2023
What about you? Do you go to church on vacation?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
We often try to attend church when traveling, sometimes our own religion and sometimes other churches. When we are traveling with our kids I find it often gives them something familiar, but it’s also fun at times to go experience something else. This weekend we’re in Washington DC for vacation so we were going to try to go to services at the National Cathedral, but now we’re stuck in a hotel with a sick kid, so probably not.
We go to church on vacations too. I look where we are going to be on each Sunday and find the local church. We are Catholic so most of the time it is easy to find a church with a convenient Mass time. http://www.masstimes.org is helpful. The only places we have trouble are in the rural west, especially Utah.
Yeah – gotta watch out for those Mormons in Utah 😀
I haven’t before, but on our next Europe trip, we plan to go in Vienna! I’ve already scouted out churches and found one that looks very biblically-based like we believe. I’ve figured out where it meets, and they even do the service in english, because it’s for locals AND those there from other places. 🙂 Very cool!
We are faithful attendees at home, but rarely go when on vacation. I am embarrassed to admit this. I’m glad this article was written. You don’t hear much about this. We’ve only recently been traveling outside of Disney World, so we need to make it a priority.
I don’t go to church but my dad was a Baptist minister and when I was a child we’d go to different denominations while on vacation. It was fun to see how other people worshipped.
We try to go to Church on vacation. Recently on a Florida trip my son and I attended a small Baptist Church. Googled the closest. One of the nice things is that you are a visitor and you know you will be welcomed.
Good topic. Episcopalian, and we often, not always attend church while traveling, which in London meant Westminster Abbey, and in Washington, the National Cathedral, and we often travel Easter Week, and have celebrated Easter in some pretty cool Episcopal/Anglican churches.
We use the church directories here:
http://faithsaves.net/church-directory/
to find a church when on vacation.
Always, if I’m there’s a Calvary Chapel where I’m traveling. I love seeing the differences in church styles. Each Calvary Chapel, while having the same core beliefs and teaching from the Bible, has a different worship style.
We usually try to go while we are on vacation. We enjoyed going in Rome (I think we wore headsets while missionaries translated). One of our favorites was Key West—they said they were the friendliest ward in the world and we really think they are. In Hawaii, I met one of my favorite food bloggers which was fun, too. In West Yellowstone, we like to go to the Playmill Theatre to watch musicals, and saw many of the actors at church. The church building has a an interesting design with wood and stones as part of the main chapel design.
We’re LDS, too and I think it helps us keep the Sabbath better and we enjoy that good feeling of going to church on Sunday. We like how similar our church is all over the world and enjoy seeing the different chapels, and meeting new people.
Those are some cool experiences. There were missionaries translating with headsets when I was in Stockholm Sweden, but nothing when we were in Barcelona a few years ago. I served a Spanish-speaking mission, so I was able to follow along okay, but the rest of my family was not. Most of my kids fell asleep 🙂
Back when I was Mormon we tried to treat Sundays on vacation just like Sunday’s at home. That meant we would go to church, avoid swimming, and if there was a temple nearby, we would try to go visit the grounds. We had some great experiences getting to meet the locals wherever we were, and even if there was a language barrier, it was nice to find something familiar and a smile.
We’re not Mormon (sorry, Latter-day Saints) anymore, but we still try to attend church when traveling, but one that corresponds to the trip. We’ve attended mass in Mexico City, Anglican service at the National Cathedral, and Christian services in Fiji. I would honestly love to attend a Buddhist or Islamic service, but not unless I’m with someone who can guide me and let me know what’s acceptable.
That’s a cool idea!
or you could travel and visit many religious sites in the world and learn from that. Add in some poignant non- formal religious sites as well. Also indigenous places.
Did you learn anything from all your travels? Where exactly have you traveled?
Maybe you should write an entry on that. Many people travel mindlessly so to speak or just bragging rights.
The true voyage of discovery is not in going to new places, but in seeing with new eyes. – Marcel Proust
This is a major regret for me that I did not include attending to the Religious services that I had grown up with, while traveling. Guarantee things would have been so much different in my life as well as better. Worse that I had kids and they got no exposure.
I really enjoy both possibilities — trying out other religions’ services while I am abroad, and also seeing how my own religion does things differently in diverse cultures. We try to mix it up.
My sister does attend church regularly, and she visited me in Nice, France, last year. I found a nearby church that had a sign saying English and Italian Mass at a certain time on Sunday morning and went with her. Turned out the Mass was only in Italian that day! Of which neither of us understood a word. She said it might have been better to go to a French service since we did both understand some French!
I just got back from a train trip to NYC from Los Angeles. I went to church everyday. In fact, I spent a significant amount of time visiting churches nabbing 38 in a week. Almost all were Catholic but 5 were Episcopalian and one Greek Orthodox. St John the Divine is certainly worth a visit. Over 600 feet long and more square footage than 2 football fields inside. Holds over 8000 for services. I enjoyed the architecture and beauty of almost all the churches I visited.
But to reiterate, when we go on vacation we always plan to go to Mass on Sunday.