Beyond D.C.

This will be my last entry on the “dirt yacht blog”. The weather is changing and it is time to go back to the boat. So, here it is…the rest of the story.

We intended to visit Philadelphia and Boston but by the time we left Washington DC we were pretty much history’d out. Besides…we still had a long way to go to get home and the urge to move along was getting pretty strong.

Dinner with Guy & Karen

A stop in Massachusetts was our chance to get together for dinner & visiting with Guy & Karen, the couple who married us in the South Pacific 4 years ago. It was great to see them again.

Salem Witch Museum

It hardly seemed right to skip Salem since we were so close, so we didn’t. It is a quaint (though somewhat spooky) little town with much history. The Info Center presented a film about the witch trials and dispelled a few myths. For example, only 20 people were put to death as witches and none were burned at the stake. All but one were hanged (which leaves you just as dead, of course) and that one, a man, was crushed to death with large rocks. Ewww. 

Salem Bookstore

While wandering through the town, we discovered an unusually eclectic used bookstore. Since bookstores are our passion, we had to go inside. The books were stacked floor to ceiling with narrow passageways between them, rather like something out of a Harry Potter movie. The proprietor was pretty adept at locating what you were looking for…and…extricating books from the middle without the whole mess smothering you but it was still a little disconcerting. Chris was happy to find a couple more of the J.A. Jance series he was looking for.

Ammonoosuc River, NH

From Massachusetts we went north to Lisbon, New Hampshire where the weather was quite warm and humid. The RV Park was right on the Ammonoosuc River (try pronouncing that after a couple wines) and was really beautiful. 

 

May snow in NH

The next day a storm moved in bringing torrential rain and the next thing we knew it was snowing! This was in late May!

Note the ship stuck on an island just above the falls!

View from the U.S. side - Horseshoe Falls

Next stop was Niagara Falls. What can you say about something this huge? The beauty and power of that much water is beyond words - gorgeous and frightening at the same time. I bought a book about the people who have gone over the falls and was surprised to learn that the first one (in 1901) was a woman - Annie Edson Taylor who was a schoolteacher. And…she survived. 

Canadian view. Note the sign warning people not to climb over the fence. Duh!

Maid of the Mist going into the mist!

The view from the Canadian side is better but both are pretty amazing. We really wanted to ride on the Maid of the Mist into the maelstrom at the bottom of the falls, but both of us were fighting head colds and the thought of being in wind and water didn’t have much appeal.

Beautiful downtown Cleveland.

From Niagara we moved on to Cleveland, OH to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I would never have guessed that Cleveland was such a beautiful, modern city. 

 

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, lake side

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, side view

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, front

The R&R Hall of Fame is the frosting on the cake. It is a gorgeous building of glass, angles & curves and it sits right on the edge of Lake Erie. 

Elvis' Continental

Janis Joplin's Porsche

Artist's rendition of "The Wall"

We spent an entire day wandering through the museum, oohing and aahing over the memorabilia, singing along with the music and re-living our youth. 

Entrance to the Rolling Stones' exhibit

Their new Rolling Stones exhibit had opened just days before we arrived and that was pretty interesting. What a trip to re-live those years…and realize that those guys are now SEVENTY and still performing. It really puts you in touch with how old YOU are as well! This turned out to be one of the best days of the whole trip.

Char & I, 45 years later!

Our next stop was Flint, Michigan where my childhood friend, Char, lives. We lived next door to each other during Jr. Hi and Hi School and had not seen each other in 45 years! So many things have happened since then. We had a wonderful visit and tears were shed when it was time for Chris & I to leave.

S.S. Badger

In order to make up a little time and avoid driving the RV through Chicago we decided to take the ferry across Lake Michigan to Wisconsin. This is no ordinary ferry! It looks more like a cross between an ocean liner and a freighter. The staff loads and unloads all the vehicles and passengers are not allowed to ride in their cars. There are numerous places to sit both inside & out, as well as dining areas, lounges, a movie theater and a gift shop. On the day we crossed, the water was flat and the weather was beautiful but since it is just miles and miles of fresh water there isn’t much to see. No whales or dolphins and few birds. It was a very expensive trip (especially with a motorhome) but saved us a lot of driving.

Badlands

We hustled through Wisconsin and across South Dakota until we reached the Badlands. Having never been here, the stark beauty of the Badlands – which sit just on the edge of the Grasslands – blew me away. 

The name, Badlands, conjures up a mental picture of all manner of misery but it is not like that at all. While I suspect it would be pretty inhospitable in the dead of winter or the middle of summer, we were there in June and it was drop dead gorgeous. Hills and valleys showing off the striations of millions of years of erosion from wind and water for as far as the eye can see.

 

Mt. Rushmore

We made day trips from this location to visit Mt. Rushmore, the Crazy Horse memorial and just generally experience some of the beautiful scenery. Much of this area is National Park and there are no fences so everywhere we went we were on the lookout for critters on the loose…and we saw plenty. 

For Darwin contestants!

Why did the buffalo cross the road? Because he could!

Buffalo were everywhere. 

"Wild" Burro

“Wild” Burros are so used to people feeding them that they walk right up to the cars and allow themselves to be petted. 

 

Cute but dangerous!

Prairie Dogs were everywhere but, cute as they are, there are numerous warnings to give them a wide berth. It seems the fleas they have carry Bubonic Plague. Not something you want to take home from a vacation.

From here it was just a couple more days travel (with one quick stop to visit friends in Montana) to home. 

Ahhhh....back in the NW!

I was a little sad for the journey to come to an end but, all in all, the American Bucket List Tour was a complete success. We saw many of the places we’d always wanted to visit but we missed a lot, too. The decision has already been made to do it again in a few years. 

 

We made it onto the cover of the Rolling Stone!

There is still plenty of country to see.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog: http://travelswithfaith.blogspot.com.