High on Adventure
MARCH/APRI 2022, OUR 26TH YEAR
ON THE ROAD AGAIN |
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In the last issue of High On Adventure we chronicled the course across Covid Country from west to east - from California to the District of Columbia. That trip was so much fun we couldn’t wait to head back across the country while varying the route to find more attractions that didn’t necessarily require us to go indoors during the pandemic. After all, if getting there is half the fun, getting back should be just as special. There’s much to see under the sky!
We start where we ended last time … in the District of Columbia where, of course, there are the sights of the nation’s capital. We saw the cherry trees along the tidal basin that fronts the Jefferson Memorial. On the mall in front of the Washington Monument was a sea of tiny white flags. The 700,000 flags symbolized the lives lost to Covid up to that point.
We stopped at the Kennedy Center which may be famous for events that take place inside its theaters, concert hall and opera house, but which offers outdoor art as well. Visitors to the center who approach on foot pass by a sculpture of Don Quixote and his horse Rocinante emerging from a rock. The statue by Aurelio Teno was a gift of the nation of Spain when the center was first opened in 1976. Much has been added since then. Next to the new facility they call the REACH is a sculpture garden where we spotted what looked like a horse made of drift wood. Actually, it is bronze cast from driftwood and assembled as a mare by Deborah Butterfield who named it “Milk River” for a river in Montana.
There are hundreds of notable sights in the Capital community, but we were particularly struck by modern metal spires that can be found after crossing the Potomac. The main feature of the US Air Force Memorial on the border of Arlington National Cemetery is a set of three curved spires designed by architect James Indigo Freed. The three resemble the contrails of a trio of US Air Force Thunderbird jets climbing into the sky from their “Bomb Burst” maneuver. The single spire in front of the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport rises 70 feet. It was designed by sculptor John Safer. It’s title - Ascent! Sounds just right to me. Before departing on our westward journey, we took an initial detour east in order to stop briefly in Annapolis, Maryland’s state capital as well as site of the United States Naval Academy.
The Capitol Building - better known as the Maryland State House - features statuary honoring historical figures including Major General Baron Johann deKalb, a German who came to America to help fight against the British in the Revolutionary War. The building itself is set in a lovely park filled with trees and, at least in the early fall, colorful flowers.
The Naval Academy boasts the most impressive dome of the area, however, with its Chapel which holds the crypt of John Paul Jones indoors. The huge dormitory, Bancroft Hall (or, as everyone calls it, “Mother Bancroft”) houses over 4,000 students, so many that the building has its own zip code.
Finally heading west, we first stopped in Frederick, Maryland, where what used to be a trickling Carroll Creek has become a scenic spectacular of water and brick.
The Allegheny portion of the Appalachian Mountain Range stood between us and the West, but nature was kind enough to leave a pass through which western-bound travelers have transited for centuries - the Cumberland Gap.
We drove through the Gap to reach Morgantown, West Virginia, where we wanted to visit the statue honoring their most famous son, the actor Don Knotts, whose likeness sits in a welcoming pose in front of the Metropolitan Theatre on High Street. His five seasons as Deputy Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show earned him Emmys, but some of us harbor memories going farther back - to the Steve Allen Show where Knotts was the nervous “Man on the Street” for Allen’s interviews.
West Virginia yielded to Ohio and Knotts to the Wright Brothers as we pulled through Dayton where the siblings’ experiments led to the invention of the heavier-than-air airplane in their bicycle shop. Unfortunately the original shop is no longer in Dayton - Henry Ford bought it and moved it to his own museum complex in Michigan. There is, however, a museum in the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park right next to one of the other buildings the Wright Brothers had as a bicycle shop at one time, and around the corner there is another one.
Moving farther west took us into Indiana where we found the Model T Museum maintained by the Model T Ford Club of America in Richmond. Their extensive collection of Model T cars - from touring cars to town cars, ambulances to buses and tractors to snow-mobiles was all displayed indoors. But outside was one item I’d not seen in ages … the kind of gas pump that used gravity to drain fuel into your tank.
In Illinois we found that the state is literally littered with Lincoln sites and sights. Practically everywhere you look there is a link to Lincoln. We stopped in the charming small town of Monticello. You’d think there might be references to our third President - Thomas Jefferson whose plantation, Monticello, is a tremendous draw in Virginia. No, this being Illinois, the tourist signs explain that our sixteenth President - honest Abe - used to stay here in the Tenbrook Hotel when, as a lawyer riding the circuit, he came to Monticello for court day. Unfortunately, the Tenbrook is no longer standing on the site where it once was. Now at that location there is a Dairy Queen drive through!
Lincoln sightings continued as we pulled into Springfield to visit the Illinois State Capitol building - with its Lincoln Statue (by Andrew O’Connor) prominently placed. But this was not the Capitol Building when Lincoln was here. That building stands a few blocks away and is currently under renovation with its dome enclosed in scaffolding. This is the building before which both Lincoln and Obama announced their candidacies for President of the United States separated by some 147 years. It is also the building that appears on the back of the Lincoln penny.
Another stop in Springfield - Lincoln Home National Historic Site - is the house the Lincoln family occupied for fifteen years before moving to the White House in Washington. In these Covid times there is an alternative to stepping inside to sample the life of Lincoln. A virtual tour is up on Google’s Arts & Culture site which lets you “walk” through the rooms. Beware, if you are easily distracted by busy patterns, the home is filled with the most actively patterned wall paper and carpeting. Check it out at artsandculture.google.
Just across the Mississippi River we stopped briefly in Hannibal, Missouri, where Sam Clemens grew up to become Mark Twain. We viewed the “Becky Thatcher House” and, across the street, the “Tom Sawyer House.” Do I hear you saying - “But neither Becky nor Tom were real people”? You are right. But what is now called the “Tom Sawyer House” was the house Sam Clemens grew up in and the “Becky Thatcher House” was the home of Laura Hawkins. In the novel, Twain patterned Sawyer after his memory of himself as a kid and “Becky” after Hawkins on whom he had a boyhood crush.
Moving further west, we made our first stop in Kansas at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum & Boyhood Home. The twenty-two acre site is overseen by an impressive statue of Eisenhower as he appeared at the time of the D-Day invasion he commanded which began the end of World War II. The library and museum flank the statue, while Eisenhower’s boyhood home is off a bit to his right.
Another Kansas stop was on the outskirts of the tiny city (population 2,046) of Oakley, Kansas,home of the Buffalo Bill Monument. It is near the site of an 1868 contest between Buffalo Bill Cody and buffalo scout Bill Comstock in which Cody slaughtered 69 buffalo in a day compared to Comstock’s “mere” 46. Such numbers were a drop in a bloody bucket for Cody who claimed a total of 4,280 dead buffalo in eight months “work.” The good people of Oakley have erected a monument to the legend of Buffalo Bill marked by this sculpture of their hero in the act.
After the flat, open stretches of Missouri and Kansas, Colorado’s mountains beckoned.
The logical first stop was Pike’s Peak, the Rocky Mountains’ Front Range’s highest summit. We headed for the tiny town of Manitou Springs at its base where a train departs for a wild ride up to the top at over 14,000 feet. This is the world’s highest cog railroad. It doesn’t run just on flat metal wheels rolling over flat metal rails relying on friction to keep a steady pace. Instead, it has a gear-like center wheel with teeth that catch on a toothed rail to keep it from sliding down slopes above ten percent. Portions of the 9-mile route are as steep as twenty-five percent, so the cogs clank away, pulling uphill, with a reassuring thunk-thunk-thunk.
The ride offers very different views at different elevations. On the ride up, below the tree line is a forrest of aspen and pine, then a barren, rock panorama before the snow-speckled peak is revealed.
There is a visitor center at the summit offering shelter from the cold and wind while allowing full appreciation of the view out window-walls. It has a cafeteria featuring a delicacy you can only savor there at the top - puffy doughnuts which, if not consumed at this altitude but taken down to the base, will collapse with the change in atmospheric pressure into doughy mush.
After the ride down, we headed into the city of Colorado Springs, home of the United States Air Force Academy and also the famous Broadmoor Hotel. The Academy’s iconic Cadet Chapel, with its 17 spires, was undergoing renovation and encased in scaffolding, so we settled for a photo from the Academy’s website. Our visit to the Broadmoor was without distractions so we include a shot we took ourselves.
A less often visited but nonetheless spectacular location in Colorado Springs, Glen Eyrie is nestled in the middle of Queen’s Canyon on the edge of the Garden of the Gods. Its main building (or “castle”) was built as the residence of one of the founders of Colorado Springs, the railroad magnate General William Jackson Palmer. Now, with about fifty acres of incredible scenery and interesting buildings, the place is operated as the Glen Eyrie Conference Center by the world-wide ministry organization, The Navigators.
More of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains views called us further west with flowing rivers, rocky crags and snow along highway 70 before we arrived in Utah. There the scenery was distinctly different but no less spectacular.
We meandered through Provo - home to Brigham Young University - and Salt Lake City where the Utah State Capitol Building commands a promontory. Nowhere, however, were mountains far out of view or out of mind.
Another promontory drew us further north and west - Promontory Summit where the transcontinental railroad came together. It was here, in an historic ceremony, that the Central Pacific Railroad coming east from California met the Union Pacific Railroad coming west from Missouri. We visited the Golden Spike National Historical Park.
We got to see a reconstruction of the Union Pacific’s engine No. 119 arrive at the stop behind the visitor center with both steam and smoke billowing into the crystal clear sky.
After the dramatic views in Colorado and Utah, what we saw on our drive through much of Nevada seemed somehow bleak and desolate. We pulled into Elko - population 18,000 - to find that its major attraction seemed to be a “centennial tower” built in 2017 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the town’s founding. It was described as resembling railroad tracks reaching up to a water tank to service steam trains at its top. To us, it just looked like a large sign.
We quickly moved on to a more photogenic spot - the State Capitol complex in Carson City. Here we found the State Capitol Building, the Supreme Court of Nevada as well as the Veterans Memorial. The buildings of the Nevada State Senate and the Nevada State Assembly are on the campus as well. Our visit was on a Sunday afternoon when no governors, judges, senators or members of the Assembly were in evidence. But there were many deer who seemed to appreciate the lush foliage.
Then, it was time for us to return to California. Our home state greeted us with a hefty snowfall along I-80 through famous Donner Pass at over 7,000 feet elevation, but clearing skies let us spot the “6,000 FT” sign as we came into Truckee where we found snow still on the rails. Our final sprint took us home, to Sausalito where the view from the deck of our floating home in Sausalito’s houseboat community welcomed us. Great trip, but even greater to be home - until the next trip!
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