All posts tagged: Heritage Travel

Observations from the road: The “On the Edge” edition

Published by

At times, Wednesday’s ride seemed as long as a California redwood is tall. Claire and I were on Day 13 of the Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour (a.k.a., the “length of the country” portion), and perhaps it had to do with it being the 13th day, but there were some weird things happening along the way.  We left Portland, Oregon at 8:30 a.m. and didn’t arrive in Eureka, California until around 6:30 p.m. for what was supposed to be a 7 hour trip.  (Darn those Google maps algorithms.)  The portions on the “straight and narrow” path of I-5 could give a guy and his daughter the blues.  Rest areas that we really needed were closing up due to “bear activity.” Ah, but those crooked roads through the mountains, the redwoods, and along the beautiful California coast…now that’s when we felt we were alive and on the edge of the world. We had to take I-5 down to Grants Pass.  The Oregon landscape is changing and beautiful through this part of the country,  but …

Efficiency Isn’t the Point

Published by

One could look at today’s itinerary for the Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour and think that our main goal was to go from Point A (Seattle) to Point B (Portland) as quickly and efficiently as possible.  But those who think that way miss the point of our cross-country trip. We avoided most of Interstate 5 – the main line between Seattle and Portland – and struck out from Gig Harbor, Washington, to get to Astoria, Oregon on the coast via the crooked road. And think of what we would have missed had we taken the straight and narrow way. Why, we wouldn’t have known that Montesano, Washington is the home of the Tree Farm.  (It says so right on the sign.) We would have missed the fact that South Bend, Washington is the Oyster Capital of the World. Given the amount of “working forests” one sees in this section of the state, I suspect this is where America’s supply of paper is produced. And who knew that McCleary, Washington will be celebrating the …

Glacier panorama at Logan Pass

Going to the sun

Published by

Wow! On a picture perfect August day, Claire and I visited Glacier National Park, The Crown of the Continent. It was an experience we’ll never forget. We had always envisioned this day – at the midpoint in our cross-country road trip – to be one of the highlights.  But as first time visitors to this park, we just couldn’t have imagined how wonderful it would be. Knowing that we wanted to beat the crowds, we left our hotel early and drove into St. Mary, the eastern gateway to the park.  On the advice of several friends, we planned to focus our visit along the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road – a National Historic Landmark and a National Engineering Landmark. According to the National Park Service website: The road officially received its name, “The Going-to-the-Sun Road,” during the 1933 dedication at Logan Pass. The road borrowed its name from nearby Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. Local legend, and a 1933 press release issued by the Department of the Interior, told the story of the deity, Sour Spirit, who came down from …

Montana Landscape

Observations From the Road (The “Jeez, Montana is a Big State” Edition)

Published by

On Friday morning, as we began our second week on the Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour, Claire and I drove the 20 miles up from Fort Peck to Glasgow, Montana where we reconnected with U.S. Route 2.  Now mind you, we had driven two-and-one-half hours in Montana the day before just to get to Fort Peck – which is in the eastern part of the state.  So imagine our surprise when we clicked on the Google maps direction finder to head west to Glacier National Park from Glasgow and the young lady on the smart phone who has become our traveling companion says: Go west on U.S. Route 2 forever. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit. It was actually something like 259 miles. But after a long day of driving through Montana’s plains along the original Hi-Line (New York City’s High Line is late to the party), it seems like forever. This Hi-Line refers to the northernmost route of the Great Northern Railroad and U.S. 2, near the Canadian border. But, as …

Observations from the road: The “prairie” edition

Published by

Having been warned that we will lose cell and online coverage as we enter the mountains portion of our trip over the next couple of days, I’m writing my next set of “Observations from the road: The prairie edition” from my outpost here on the front porch of the historic Fort Peck Hotel in Fort Peck, Montana.  (The beautiful and flat part of Montana, as their website describes it.) You can catch earlier parts of the “Observations” series here (the Central Time edition) and here (essentially the Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana edition). Fort Peck dam was built in the 1930s as a WPA project, and this building was originally constructed to house the workers.  It was converted into a hotel in the 1930s, and has served sportsmen, patrons of the Fort Peck Summer Theatre Playhouse, and wayward travelers like Claire and me ever since.  The rooms are small and simple but the lobby (where I wrote last evening’s post) is down home and friendly with a well-stocked bar.  The only disappointment was that the dining …

Cloister Walk

A jewel on the prairie

Published by

Some of the most amazing finds on the road occur in the most unlikely places. When my colleague Jenny Buddenborg learned I was traveling cross-country with Claire – and taking in North Dakota in the process – she directed me to one of America’s hidden gems:  a college campus in Bismarck, North Dakota designed by Marcel Breuer, one of the masters of Modernism. The University of Mary is a small, Catholic school located on rolling hills about 7 miles outside of Bismarck. The university’s website picks up the story from here: In the 1950’s, when the Benedictine Sisters of the Annunciation founded their original priory and later planned for the first campus buildings for Mary College, they asked Breuer if he would create the architectural designs. To their delight he accepted and conceived expansive structures of native prairie stone and exquisite concrete shapes, notable for their interplay of light and shadow. Breuer called it his “jewel on the prairie.”  After an hour touring the campus this morning, I wouldn’t disagree. Thanks to Jenny and the …

Observations From the Road (The “Central Time” Edition)

Published by

Claire and I were driving through the heart of Central Minnesota today when the Pokey LaFarge paean to Middle America – Central Time – popped up on the iPhone playlist. Yet another omen! The Missouri is my right arm, the Ohio is my left But I’m livin’ on the Mississippi River where I like life the best I don’t mind the west coast, and I don’t mind the east coast Oh, baby, but I ain’t gonna live on no coast. I’m just a plain ole Midwestern boy, Getting by on Central time So thanks to Pokey’s reminder, here are a few (more) observations from the road – in the Central Time edition. Some oddities really are worth seeing – We went an hour out of our way today to see the largest ball of twine rolled by one person, and it was SO worth it.   As the great post on the Roadside America blog puts it, “One runs across more than a few balls on the obsession landscape…But special tribute must be paid to the Mother of the moss gathering …

With Liz and Dave at the Twins game 08 05 14

Main Street, baseball, and rhubarb crisp (?)

Published by

Main Streets and baseball. What could be more American? More  importantly, can you have a bad day when these two things converge?  Not in my book. But how did the rhubarb crisp replace apple pie?  Well, you’ll just have to read on to find out. We began our first Tuesday – Day 5 on the Not All Who Wander Are Lost cross-country tour – in tiny Spring Green, Wisconsin. For a town of 1400 (I love town signs that post the population), Spring Green had much to offer.  The downtown has a variety of interesting shops and services, and my friend Oakley Pearson – who drives through this area each year on his way home to Minnesota – recommended the Spring Green General Store for breakfast.  Claire and I took him up on that recommendation, and after a great bowl of oatmeal (see, we can eat healthy food), we’re glad we did. Business was hopping with a great mix of patrons. I stopped by one table to tell the guy wearing the 1952 Vincent Black …

Hillside detail at Taliesin

A remarkable afternoon at Taliesin

Published by

Some days on the road are magical. Yesterday — spent at Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Taliesin — was one such afternoon. Our cross-country road trip includes a couple of places that are clearly what one could tag as a busman’s holiday. Thanks to the generous offer of my good friend Jeff Grip of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Claire and I were met at Taliesin – Wright’s Spring Green, Wisconsin, home – by Effi Casey, a member of the Taliesin Fellowship; a graduate of the architecture school at Taliesin; the widow of the long-time dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Tom Casey; and an accomplished violinist who serves as the Director of Music at the school. We were also joined for the afternoon by Floyd Hamblen, a member of the Taliesin Fellowship who serves on the faculty of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, is a practicing architect, and lives year-round with his family at Taliesin. I’m pictured with the two of them inside Effi’s home on the grounds, known locally as …

Not All Who Wander Tour 2014

Not all who wander are lost: The tour

Published by

I have always wanted to drive cross-country. So when Claire left for college in California as a freshman in the fall of 2011, I told her about my bucket list dream and promised that one of her trips from Washington (the east coast one) to California would take place in a car with her dad. Guess who begins her senior year at the end of August?  And guess who passes a major birthday milestone next winter? With those deadlines looming, we leave on our drive tomorrow, August 1st.  It was now or never. And we are pumped about this trip! As we’d both driven much of the “southern” (i.e., direct) route in shorter trips, we decided to wander around a bit in the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Pacific Northwest before we finally make our way to Southern California.  I’ve dubbed it our Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour.  I just wish I’d thought ahead to have t-shirts made!  (Cue the eye rolling by Claire.) So over the next 20 days, you’ll get …