Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.
Showing 17 of 236 posts
United StatesLeaving Cedar Rapids, we pointed west toward Montana and the Bohlingers, by way of South Dakota: the falls in the heart of Sioux Falls, a Harvest Host night parked on such a slope we slept with our feet below our heads, a hilly round at Red Rock in Rapid City, and a stop at the cheekily named Naked Winery, where the wines turned out as good as their names are bold.
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United StatesWe crossed into Missouri for one reason: Hamilton, and the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Janice came to quilting through a bag of squares her mother and grandmother sewed in 1930, and here was a one-stoplight town remade into the 'Disneyland of quilting' by Jenny Doan and her family, with J.C. Penney's first job and a lounge called Man's Land thrown in.
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United StatesLeaving the family at Lake Sunapee, we drove west through Vermont and New York to a Harvest Host winery on Seneca Lake, then on to Cleveland for lunch with Janice's niece Kim and a fine evening in Fremont with Ari and Hedi, friends from our 2011 Alaska RV trip. A morning round at Swan Lake in Indiana, and we pointed the rig toward Chicago.
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United StatesGetting into New Hampshire meant first chasing down a generator that wouldn't start, then a fine stretch of family and country: Connie and Lee in Derry, where Janice retold her 1986 Corvette adventure; the Sunapee mill and Jeff Trow, keeper of the town's cemeteries; a stream-side site at Northstar; and a glorious morning at the Country Club of New Hampshire under Mount Kearsarge.
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United StatesWe pointed the Roadtrek north on July 8, John's new VA hearing aids freshly installed, and put in eight hours to reach Tallulah Gorge in the Georgia mountains. We hiked to the 1913 dam and down to L'eau d'Or Falls, passed on the twelve hundred stairs to the bottom, and crossed into West Virginia, where getting an EZ-Pass proved anything but easy.
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United StatesOur last day around Cooperstown brought Ellen's folks and their stray cat Hobo, a campsite beside firefighters traveling with their foster children, and a morning round on the little course where Janice once golfed with her father. Then it was over to Saratoga for a round ahead of the rain, a night at the firehouse, and the long, happy turn toward home, by way of family in New Hampshire and friends all the way down to Florida.
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United StatesIn a tiny old theater, an actor named Joe Wiegand stepped out as Theodore Roosevelt and held us spellbound, and afterward, since John's family had lived near Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill, we traded notes with him over a Maker's Mark at the Rough Rider. We learned the true story of the teddy bear, ate a pitchfork-fondue steak we would not order again, and took in the Medora Musical, which opened on the sad news that a thirty-year cast member had died the night before.
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United StatesMedora was the brainchild of a French marquis who, in 1883, set out to ship refrigerated beef east by rail and built a whole town to do it, named for his wife; the scheme failed but the town endured as cattle country, and Roosevelt's 1903 visit left it a Rough Rider Hotel. The next day we drove the badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, green for once after the rains, past prairie dog towns and buffalo, and a lone bull who posed beside the road.
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United StatesWe came to Medora for a golf course, the Bully Pulpit, one of the country's top hundred public courses, set in the badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and green as Ireland after a rainy year. The name is Roosevelt's, and so is the place: it was here in the Dakota Territory that a grieving young man found himself and the love of wild country he carried into a conservation legacy still with us. Our RV neighbor, it turned out, parked his winter ice house right beside us.
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United StatesA wrong turn into a Butte cemetery to wash the mud off the RV put us, of all places, at Evel Knievel's grave. We spent a thrifty night at the Bozeman Walmart, nursed a cracked wheel rim into Billings, and passed a wonderful evening with John Bohlinger, an old friend of John's family, and his new bride Nancy, of a Montana ranching clan a hundred years deep.
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United StatesBack in the States, we skirted Glacier on Highway 2, the Going-to-the-Sun Road still snowed shut up top, and made for Whitefish, where John's family had come by train from Seattle for a high-school ski trip in 1962. We played Whitefish Lake under the ski runs, then swung south to the National Bison Range, a 1908 sanctuary, to bump along nineteen thousand acres of muddy road among bison, mule deer, and a lone elk.
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CanadaCrossing into Canada gave us our one sour note of the trip, a border agent who'd plainly gotten up on the wrong side, and a thirty-minute search of the RV down to the dirty laundry. Then British Columbia and Alberta opened up beautiful all the way to Waterton Lakes, the Canadian half of Glacier, where cottonwood snow drifted through town, ground squirrels chirped from every hole, and a round of golf was cut short by a brown bear and her cub on the 16th fairway.
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United StatesEastern Washington is dam country, and we could not get over the scale of it. Chief Joseph alone powers metropolitan Seattle; Grand Coulee, a mile of concrete on the Columbia, is one of the largest things people have ever built, and the Columbia Basin Project it anchors waters a vast stretch of the West. We spent a night at Steamboat Rock, a state park the project left behind, and stopped at Box Canyon Dam on a rare north-flowing river before turning for Canada.
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United StatesWashington was family before it was scenery. We stayed with old friends the Wanicks, Janice played a USGA senior qualifier at Renton, and we sat with John's brother Will, on the mend after surgery, while the family gathered on Whidbey Island; John's boyhood friend Lee Taylor came for a barbecue and twenty years fell away. Then we crossed Deception Pass and drove Highway 20 through the North Cascades, the American Alps, past Ross Lake and a roadside plaque to a 'Jack Wilson' who happened to share John's father's name.
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United StatesAcross Oregon we stopped in Union for the Eastern Oregon Livestock Show, where four farm kids from Medford were showing their pigs, and played an empty morning course at Buffalo Creek. We browsed the wool at Pendleton, tasted our way through the Walla Walla valley with new friends Jim and Robin, and finished with a day in Hillsboro at the home of John and Sandy, the couple we'd met on the South America cruise, wine, dinner, and a shuffleboard rematch left unsettled.
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United StatesIdaho meant potato country, and a couple of family memories: a Flagler neighbor who farmed red potatoes, and John's father trucking Idaho spuds to Seattle for fresh-cut fries before frozen took over. We golfed in the Snake River Canyon at Twin Falls under the BASE-jumping Perrine Bridge, caught the morning rainbow at Shoshone Falls, the Niagara of the West, and finally got the Roadtrek set right in Boise.
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United StatesAfter South America we were home barely long enough to repack before climbing back into the Roadtrek, our 'twenty-two foot yacht on wheels,' for a summer on the road. We ran west from Florida to Sedona to see Marty and Jeff, by way of a Gulf beach, the back roads of the Deep South, the Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock, and a canyon night at Palo Duro, with the RV's batteries and refrigerator doing their best to keep things interesting.
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