Nature can do without man, but man cannot do without nature.

Prentice Bloedel

After ten days of sometimes hectic traffic, winds strong enough to blow your house away, and all the other challenges a cross-country trip entails, it was a special gift for our family to take us to the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island.

The Bloedel Reserve is a 150-acre forest garden created by Virginia and Prentice Bloedel. Bloedel was the vice-chairman of the lumber company Macmillan Bloedel Ltd, and he and his wife were strongly influenced by the conservation movement and Asian philosophy. They wished to capture the essence of the Japanese garden—the qualities of naturalness, subtlety, reverence, tranquility—and construct a Western expression of it.

The Bloedels lived in the Manor House for approximately 30 years before opening the Reserve to the public in 1988 as a family run foundation.

Although the Reserve includes a traditional Japanese garden, the Bloedels’ approach for the rest of the property stands in contrast to that of ‘Japanese gardens’ which achieve their effects through the use of ornament. The Bloedel Reserve has both natural and highly landscaped lakes, immaculate lawns, woods, a stone garden, a moss garden, a rhododendron glen, and a reflection garden. The Bloedels’ French Chateau-style home, including many original furnishings, is preserved as a visitor center.

We spent about two hours wandering along the many paths throughout the Reserve. It was a beautiful day to see the gardens, and for us it was a great gift of tranquility and peace, especially to enjoy it with family.

Well, not exactly.

As I write this, we are currently in Seattle living in a luxurious home that belongs to a family member, with a beautiful view of Lake Washington and Mount Rainier from the backyard, solar-heated swimming pool, and a lovely new kitchen from which incredible meals are turned out every evening. Definitely worth driving 3,000 miles across the United States for!

However, after our last night’s experience with the instability of our tent in very windy weather, we decided to give up the idea of tent camping our way back home. Instead, we have returned our tent and several other pieces of camping equipment we won’t be needing anymore, thanks to Amazon’s and REI’s generous return policies, and instead we’re doing something quite novel for us: we will stay in motels on our return trip. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to find some suitable old-fashioned motor inns where we can park our car right in front of our door, and forego the lobby/elevator/endless corridors to get to your room that you find in most of the big chains. A bit of 50’s decor would be nice too.

So, even though we no longer own our “tent” home, we are grateful that we still have our Sylvansport GO camper waiting for us back at out Lake Monticello home. After our experience with putting up and taking down a tent (that didn’t always want to stay up), setting up our GO is now going to feel like a walk in the park. And we’re optimistic that by next summer there will be a much larger network of charging stations across the country so that it will be easier for us to take the GO without worrying about finding a charging station when needed.

The first view of the Columbia River is always a blow-away moment for me. The expanse of it is one aspect that is awe-inspiring, as well as the remarkable blue of its water. But in a larger sense, I always feel like I’m looking at a major artery of the magnificent river system of the West that has done so much to define its geography.

There was plenty of river traffic, and we saw all kinds, including many wind surfers closer to the coast.

The first glimpse of Mount Hood is also a breathtaking moment.

The Hood River Bridge is an intimidating structure. I’ve been over it in a motorcycle and an RV, and both times I was very grateful to reach the other side in one piece. That said, it’s impossible not to stare at the water moving rapidly below, and if you’re brave enough to look through the grating in the center of the bridgelift, it’s truly awesome. For a better sense of what I’m talking about, you can check out my essay, Finding Religion on the Road, at https://wordpress.com/page/caroltracycarr.com/49.

We spent the night on the John Day River, a tributary of the Columbia River, and that’s where we experienced the real forces of nature engendered by it. The winds surrounding the river are incredible, as evidenced by its high popularity among windsurfers, and this extends to the John Day as well. We set up our tent just a short ways up the road across from the site of the large white RV in the above photo and our camp was situated at the base of a hill that rose at a steep angle behind us. Shortly after the setting of the sun, the evening breezes began pouring down the hill, providing welcome relief from the 100 degree temperatures we’d endured for most of the day. But by the middle of the night, those breezes turned into a gale. As our tent was designed on the “umbrella” concept, it continually tried to close down on top of us for most of the night. By 4:30AM, as the sun began to rise, we gave up the fight. We folded our tent and took off, hoping to find a breakfast cafe where we could find enough coffee to make up for our lost sleep.

It’s a challenge to summarize several days of traveling across the United States when the changes in the landscape are both subtle and dramatic, passing from wide open prairies and plains, to crop-filled fields in various stages of agriculture, and ultimately to the dramatic scenes of the mountains and rivers of the far west. I enjoy the slow evolution of the landscape and find it one of the most peaceful experiences I know to be the passive recipient of all this novelty and beauty. For there is beauty in even the scrubbiest landscape when one considers it supports life in some form, even if we can’t see it.

These are just examples of the slow progression we experienced over the last four days before we reached our destination in Seattle.

Towns are generally named after admirable citizens who’ve made a major contribution to the founding or the economic or political development of a community. Not so with Julesburg, a sleepy little town in Colorado, close to the Nebraska border. The grain elevator (above) is the tallest building in town.

The original trading post was named for Jules Beni, who was on the Pony Express route from Missouri to California. How he got the town named after him is a mystery when one considers his history. Because the Pony Express required a LOT of horses, with a fresh horse being provided a rider every ten miles, it was ripe for horse thieving, and Jules Beni was one of them. When one of the superintendents for the Central overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company, Jack Slade, came looking for him, Beni shot him five times. Thinking he was dead, the townsfolk chased Beni out of Julesburg, but when they returned they discovered Slade had miraculously recovered. This didn’t stop Beni’s horse thievery, and Slade made it personal, vowing to hunt him down. When he finally captured Beni, Slade took justice into his own hands and, in a rather spectacular manner, made certain that Beni was very dead by the time he was finished. It’s the sort of story of the old west that provided content for movies and TV series in the 1950’s.

Apparently there was no move to change the name of the town to a more respectable citizen, or perhaps they were too busy farming.

A note about grain elevators: it has always intrigued me that some grain elevators (and I’ve seen hundreds over the course of 25 years of travel in the west) have what appears to be a box on the top. City girl that I am, I’ve always thought it served as an office space for the people running the grain elevator. Not so. It apparently contains some of the mechanics required to run the grain elevator in a space called the headhouse. See the diagram below.

Accomplishing a cross-country trip with his new electric car, a Hyundai Ioniq 5, was a challenge Roger took on with relish. Many people have asked us along the way of our recent travels what it’s like. We’ve met several drivers who own the same car (well, maybe different color), and we’ve had some great conversations with them, which have always ended with an agreement that everyone enjoys their new car. But for many, taking an electric car on a long trip raises a lot of questions and concerns. So here’s the answer to some of those.

First, you need to have a charging station, and they don’t grow on every city corner the way gas stations do. Because we have a two years of free charging from Electrify America, those are the chargers we aim for, and they look like this:

Generally there are four chargers, but sometimes there are more, and they’re usually situated around Walmarts or mall shopping centers, although they’re increasingly showing up at many diverse locations. So, unlike going to a gas station, there is always some uncertainty about whether there will be a charging station available to use when you want to use it. And if they are all unavailable, you either wait in line or go to find another charger. This is not as easy as finding another gas station. Even large cities may have only one charging station available.

That said, in all our travels thus far, we have only once found ourselves in a situation where there was no charger available in the near future and we were forced to move on to another. Fortunately, we were traveling on the East Coast, where it’s relatively easy to find one nearby.

Which leads to the next concern, which is how do you get across the United States being dependent on the availability of charging stations? Well, from the map above, it’s clear that you’d better steer clear of the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming, and even West Virginia might be chancy. We’re optimistic that in time, hopefully by next year, this will not be a problem, but for our travels on this trip, while following I-80 much of the way, we needed to swing down down towards Denver, and we’re now working our way back up in a northwesterly direction towards Seattle. It’s all beautiful country, so this is really no problem.

On that point, we did have a bit of trepidation as we grew close to our crossing the Rocky Mountains, which we did through I-70 at the Loveland Pass, as we had not yet tested the Hyundai on any mountains higher than Rockfish Gap near Charlottesville (about 1850 ft.) Our fears were unfounded, as we discovered the regen capability of the electric motor (which puts electricity back into the battery) gave us plenty of extended battery life.

The other main difference with traveling in an electric car is that, unlike the kind of “hit and run” you do at a gas station, i.e., grab your gas and go, it’s a more leisurely endeavor. For my purposes, it’s a welcome break when I can get either some shopping accomplished, or some computer work done, while we wait generally no more than 30 minutes for the car to charge. After that, we’re free for another 230 miles or so, at which time we’re ready for a break anyway. So I find that part of the entire process quite enjoyable.

And there’s nothing like knowing that, for the next two years at least, our car travel costs are minimal. With today’s high fuel prices, it’s making this cross-country trip that would normally cost over a thousand dollars in fuel, very affordable.

One more thing — the car is a joy to drive! It’s solid on the road, has a very smooth run, has an incredible amount of safety features, and has plenty of power when needed. For us, it’s a winner.

Perhaps most of us might be familiar with Boys Town from the 1938 movie by that name which starred Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney in roles which won them and the picture Academy Awards. It’s the story of a compassionate priest who takes orphaned and at-risk boys and provides them with a home and, along the way, guidance towards living a better life than they’ve known. I highly recommend it, dated though it might be, if you haven’t seen it.

The real story of Boys Town merits its own awards, and the story continues to grow and keeps getting better and better. The original Boys Town was established by Father Flanagan in 1917 when he used a loan of $90 to rent a home in Omaha to care for five boys. Since then, it has gone from this…

…to this:

The campus that we drove through was every bit as beautiful as Notre Dame’s, although with far fewer buildings. At its peak, it housed up to 880 boys. Since then, their programs have evolved in many new directions, and it now includes girls.

While the initial concept of Boys Town was to form a “City of Little Men,” Father Flanagan envisioned a developed community to be know as “The Village of Boys Town.” The boys elected their own government, including a mayor, counceil and comissioners, and eventually became designated as an official village in the state of Nebraska.

However, Boys Town’s story has grown far larger than Father Flanagan’s most ambitious imaginings. After his untimely death in 1948, new executive directors came along, and with them came expanded fund-raising for the organization that gave it financial security. It also developed the Boys Town Institute for Communication Disorders in Children, which has since been renamed the Boys Town National Research Hospital. The third executive director focused on pioneering new methods and directions of care for the boys he called “social orphans,” which led to the development of Family Home programs, and a Teaching-Family Model to develop community based, family-style, skill-oriented group home treatment foe disadvantaged and delinquent youth. Quite a large order!

And it has proven a successful one, there are now Boys Towns in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, Washington DC, George, Pennsylvania and Illinois. The story of Boys Towns continues with many more achievements, much of which I was unaware of. In fact, until we visited Boys Town, my first thought was always of this image:

Yes, I’m well aware that Indiana is called the Hoosier State, even though this name’s derivation is a bit murky, but I propose a far more appropriate name that comes with great justification: the Stadia State. I came to this conclusion after visiting the campus of the University of Notre Dame.*

The University of Notre Dame’s campus is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful university campuses around the world, and is noted for the Golden Dome, the Basilica, the Grotto and its many statues and museums. It has grown from the Old College, used as a residence, bakery, and classroom, into a campus of 1,250 acres that includes 170 buildings and athletic fields.

But you have to drive quite a distance to find the oldest part of the campus. As you approach the campus, all that you see are the various stadia that now occupy the campus; the above is one of the biggest, where the Fighting Irish football team…well, fights. (Actually, all of the unversity’s athletic teams are know collectively as the Fighting Irish.) There are several more stadia.

At the end of our drive through the Notre Dame campus, I was impressed at its beauty, but moreso at how remarkable that a university can be recognized as one of the top universities in the United States, and also gained such prominence in the athletic world. To name just a few: 7 Heisman Trophy winnders, 13 athletics in the Pro Hall of Fame, and 17 national chamionships in various sports.

So with all this input, and also realizing there are many more Indiana schools that have proven excellence in their athletics, I believe Stadia State is most appropriate.

*”Hoosier” is the official name for the People of Indiana, but its origin is debatable. It was in general use by the 1840’s, having been popularized by John Finley’s 1833 poem, “The Hoosier’s Nest.” There is an entire body of scholarship surrounding its etymology. If you’re interested, check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoosier.

No…not in a boat. Although there were many on the lake, ranging from the small sailboats darting around in a swift breeze to these shipping vessels moored along the shore of Erie, PA. We were cruising along US 6 from Erie to just before Sandusky; it was a very slow, slog taking the closest road to the lake, but it was well worth it. The beauty of the lake and the charming villages along the way made our day.

Having grown up with a family cottage on the north side of Lake Erie (just outside Kingsville, Ontario, Canada, I had spent many moments wondering what was on the other side of the lake, impossible to see from our vantage point. Now I know!

Once we left the shore just east of Sandusky, we entered that stretch of the US where farms provided the predominant scenery, and I lack the words to make infinite fields of corn and soybean sound interesting, other than that, after only a very short history of having my own vegetable garden, I am very aware of the tremendous amount of work hours it takes to create the huge and highly productive farms we pass on our roads west.

We ended our second day with dinner at the Speedtrap Diner, an enthusiastic restaurant that celebrates the 50’s by providing what they call funkadelic ambiance.

The food was delicious and the service was excellent. We recommend it!

Travel for us is a kind of jigsaw puzzle now, where we are filling in bits of pieces of the bigger picture of the United States that we’ve been creating during the twenty-five years of our marriage and our travels together. Altoona is one of those pieces. Despite Roger attending university about a hundred miles away, and Carol living for a year in Johnstown just a few miles away, neither of us had been there. So we decided to make it a destination and take in the Railroaders Memorial Museum, which is a celebration of Altoona’s role in developing the railroad industry in that area in the early 1800’s and what that meant for the city. At that time the railroad WAS Altoona. The Pennsylvania Railroad brought workers from all over the country and together they built the town up to a population at one time of 38,000. Exhibits showed how the engineer, the conductor, the brakeman, the coal stoker and signalman all had to work together as a team to make it all work; some of those jobs were very dangerous. Severed fingers were a common injury for the men in charge of linking the cars together, and the coal man often shoveled up to 2 tons of coal per trip from, for example, Pittsburgh to Harrisburg. Tough work but they were glad to have it.

We were greeted in the front lobby of the museum by the Spirit of Altoona, which is currently being restored in the roundhouse of the museum. It is an iconic seam locomotive: the K4s Class engine is a masterwork of technology born of Altoona, Pennsylvania’s engineering and innovation. These mammoth engines propelled a growing nation through two world wars, the Great Depression, and a booming postwar America. Today, only two of these locomotives survive.

Another exhibit showed the inside the engineer’s “cockpit.” It appeared to me like taking multi-tasking to the extreme. Note in the picture below the seat in the bottom right corner. He had to stay out of the way of the coal stoker who who shoveling coal into the door in the middle. And his job was very important because any lowering of the temperature could cause the boiler to explode.

For more details on this remarkable museum, check out https://www.railroadcity.org.

The next piece of our jigsaw puzzle fell into place when the town of Punxsatawney, PA appeared on the road before us. Our stop there wasn’t intentional, but it seemed a good spot for lunch, and we learned some interesting things from the locals while we were there. First, Groundhog Day was NOT filmed in Punxsatawney, which I consider a mistake because it is a very photogenic town and proud of it’s heritage as the Weather Capital of the World. It is in beautiful shape for the large influx of people who come to celebrate Groundhog Day on February 2, when Punxsatawney Phil either sees or doesn’t see his shadow to predict whether there will be six more weeks of winter.

Second, there is a real Punxatawney Phil, who lives in a large glass cage in the town library and is open for visitors. (I had always thought they just found the nearest groundhog available and gave him one day of fame. Not so.) Phil lives there with his companion/wife/significant other named Phyllis, and while we didn’t go to visit them (next time!), I was told they were quite a happy couple.

That said, it really isn’t all that necessary to visit Phil, as there is are many Phils all over town on many of the corners of town and in the parks. Here are a few….