Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.
Showing 8 of 236 posts
United StatesWe spent a Spokane morning tracking down John's family. We found his grandparents' old Rockwood house, were invited in, and heard about the basement safe no one had dared open; we visited St. John's Cathedral, where his parents married and his brother Peter was baptized; and we picked out the Desert family home and the old Desert Hotel downtown. At seventy-two, John's memory held.
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United StatesJanice found us the Lewis and Clark Caverns near Whitehall, Montana, and what a history they hold: discovered by hunters in 1892, made a national monument by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, fought over for decades by a tour-running quarryman named Dan Morrison, and finally, after the CCC carved its way through, Montana's first state park. The tour itself, bats and broken columns and all, was not to be missed.
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United StatesOn the road to the Bohlingers we swung through Deadwood, hoping to see the graves of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, only to be turned back by a road that would not take the RV. Then on to Billings and dear friends John and Nancy, a grandson's birthday with three generations on hand, cheesy eggs in the morning, and a hearing-aid fix before we rolled toward the Lewis and Clark Caverns.
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United StatesComing back into Iowa stirred up a year of memories, so we finally told the 2018 stops the RV troubles had kept off the blog: the American Pickers store at LeClaire, the Hoover Library, the covered Bridges of Madison County, John Wayne's birthplace at Winterset, and the Amana Colonies, seven old German villages with a communal past and a refrigerator company in their future.
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United StatesHaving loved the Soudan mine last year, we went down into the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in West Virginia, riding the mantrip five hundred feet in behind a guide who spent twenty years underground. He showed us the thirty-inch seams worked on hands and knees, the rats that meant the air was safe, and twenty cents a ton for a brutal day's labor. Above ground, a whole company town, homes, church, school, and the store that kept a man in debt, told the rest of the story.
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United StatesCooperstown holds a special place in Janice's heart; she summered here as a girl, water skiing and golfing on Otsego Lake with her father. We came back to play the old course and to look up John's boyhood friend Steve Mahlum, unseen in thirty years, who with his wife Ellen brought the town alive, the Clark fortune and the Singer sewing machine, the Dakota, and the tall tale that made Cooperstown the home of baseball though Doubleday never had a hand in the game.
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United StatesWe have always loved the presidential libraries, and Herbert Hoover's, at his birthplace in West Branch, Iowa, asks a fair question: how did a brilliant humanitarian who fed millions come to be remembered as a failure? We set out to tell his whole story, the Quaker orphan who made a mining fortune, organized the rescue of starving Belgium and Russia, and then had the Great Depression land on his desk within months of taking office. It is a fuller and more generous picture than the schoolbooks give.
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United StatesWe drove up into the north woods of Minnesota to tour the Soudan Underground Mine, the old iron mine on the Vermilion Range that helped build and arm America. Our guide James took us down a loud, dark cage to the twenty-seventh level, 2,341 feet under and nearly 700 below the sea, then by ore train into the workings. It is the story of the high-grade iron, and the hard-working people, that fed the nation's steel.
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