Summer Fun, 2018
15 stories, in order from the beginning of the trip.
1May 21, 2018
Dateline May 21, 2018, Off in Our 22 Foot Yacht on Wheels
After 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.
2June 12, 2018
Dateline June 12, 2018, Idaho, Twin Falls and Boise
Idaho 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.
3June 15, 2018
Dateline June 15, 2018, Oregon and a Touch of Washington Wine
Across 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.
4June 17, 2018
Dateline June 17, 2018, Family and the North Cascades
Washington 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.
5June 21, 2018
Dateline June 21, 2018, The Great Dams of the Columbia
Eastern 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.
6June 23, 2018
Dateline June 23, 2018, Into Canada, Waterton Lakes
Crossing 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.
7June 24, 2018
Dateline June 24, 2018, Whitefish and the Bison Range
Back 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.
8June 26, 2018
Dateline June 26, 2018, Evel Knievel and Old Friends
A 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.
9July 3, 2018
Dateline July 3, 2018, The Bully Pulpit and Theodore Roosevelt
We 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.
10July 4, 2018
Dateline July 4, 2018, Medora and the National Park
Medora 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.
11July 5, 2018
Dateline July 5, 2018, A Roosevelt Salute and the Medora Musical
In 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.
12July 8, 2018
Dateline July 8, 2018, Soudan Underground Mine
We 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.
13July 12, 2018
Dateline July 12, 2018, Herbert Hoover
We 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.
14July 23, 2018
Dateline July 23, 2018, Janice's Cooperstown
Cooperstown 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.
15July 24, 2018
Dateline July 24, 2018, Saratoga and the Road Home
Our 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.