6/21/2018 Baker City, OR to Ogden, UT. Despite some minor problems (car in a pond, card-keys that would not work), the breakfast buffet was actually very good. And given our tendency for late starts, we had the breakfast area to ourselves. We were soon on our way southeast bound on I-84 headed for Boise with Cheryl’s sister Carol taking a turn at the wheel. The early cloudiness of Baker soon turned to lovely partly cloudy skies. Boise has the look…
6/22/2018 Ogden, Utah to Grand Junction, Colorado We started out the day by doing our planned visit to the Utah State Railroad Museum, which was only about a 5-minute drive from our hotel in Ogden. I thought we would go to the museum for a short visit then hit the road for Grand Junction. I should have known better. The trouble was that the museum turned out to be way more interesting than I expected, which caused us to stay…
6/23/2018. Mostly sunny. 56F/83F Over the Continental Divide: Grand Junction to Manitou Springs (Colorado Springs) Slept in ’til nearly 8 o’clock after being up until 2 a.m. last night culling the bumper crop of yesterday’s photos at the Ogden railroad, classic car and Browning Museums, and writing up journal notes for the day. Had breakfast this morning in the in the hotel’s tiny breakfast room which luckily had one table open that had room for the four of us. It…
6/24/2018: Manitou Springs, Colorado to Hays, Kansas Once we were all packed up and checked out of the hotel we drove to the Garden of the Gods, which is a park of fantastically-shaped red rock outcroppings in the shape of big fins and cliffs that jut out of the ground reaching for the sky. Quite something. We went in via the back entrance on the Manitou Springs side and got on Juniper Way, the main loop road. We soon discovered…
Over the Hill, Part 27, London: The Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey 5/11/2017 Thursday. Cloudy, burning off late afternoon. 37F/68F After breakfast, we headed out for our tour of Parliament. We were pushing it a bit on time, and had to stop at the Portcullis House across the street from Parliament to pick up our tour tickets, and with the traffic, and the crowds, and the TSA-style security check upon entering Parliament, we barely made it by our ticket time…
Click on the map above to enlarge. Then click AGAIN on the area you’d like to see closer — and it’ll get REALLY big! Move around the super-enlarged map via the R side and bottom Windows “sliders”. Source: National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/carto/hfc/carto/media/LECLmap1.jpg Map of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, 1804-1806 We generally followed the westbound path, shown in red. Roads don’t necessarily stick to the banks of the Missouri — quite often you have to seek out overlooks with good…
6/25 to 6/28/2018. Kansas City, KS. Sunny, hot and humid. Daytime highs: 87F to 102F. Whereas a Lewis & Clark trip has been on our bucket list for years, the reason we made the trip this year was because a group of Cheryl’s & sister Carol’s Spangler cousins decided to have a reunion in Kansas City. That gave us a perfect reason to do the Lewis & Clark trail and a family reunion on the same trip. This post is…
6/30/2018 The thing about Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the Lewis & Clark expedition was how outrageous the whole plan was. The scheme was to send a military expedition across half the continent that didn’t even belong to the U.S. All the drainage of the Missouri River belonged to Spain, and the Oregon Country was in dispute, claimed variously by Great Britain, France, Russia and Spain. The idea of the Louisiana Purchase had not even been thought of yet! When Jefferson…
6/30/2018 St Louis, MO 95F/88% humidity On to the next phase of this trip: the Lewis and Clark Trail. The drive across the full width of the state of Missouri from Kansas City to St Louis on I-70 proved to be a bit of a freeway slog across mostly flat farmland with occasional rolling hills. I didn’t realize how big Missouri is — it took nearly 5 hours. With Cheryl at the wheel and Jim using GPS and Apple Maps…