It’s hard to describe the feeling when your vehicle is headed in the direction of home, and your thoughts grow increasingly of the comforts of your own bed and your own refrigerator, and being back in the land of the familiar. It happens with every trip, when we find ourselves foregoing a side trip or some attraction in the interest of being at home again. Perhaps one of the blessings of the electric car is that it makes you stop more often, take more time to ponder where you’re at and note the differences of the various states and towns we’re in. On the other hand, access to charging stations also dictates the route one can take, and in our case, we decided that I-70 was the best road for our trip home. The route below is fairly close to the one we followed.

So after leaving Washington, we first aimed for the Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park in Montana, headed southeast to Salt Lake City, and then picked up I-70 around Green River and stayed on it into Pennsylvania. Below are some of the landscapes we were treated to along the way.

This is a sculpture created by the Chewelah sculptor David Govedare that is on a hill overlooking the Columbia River, entitled Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies. (Grandfather is a Symbol of the Great Spirit.) Originally he envisioned a 36-ft tall woven basket made of steel, tipped on its side to allow the horses to run free. The 15 galloping horses are life-size.

East of St. Louis, the landscape became primarily one of corn, wheat, and soy fields until we reached the hills and mountains of the Appalachian Mountains. We also met with a lot of rain in that part of the country, sometimes very heavy; we didn’t realize until after we had reached home and heard news of the flooding of St. Louis and other places we traveled through that we were driving just ahead of the terrible weather that did so much damage to the Midwest.

Home never looked better when we pulled into our driveway, and I gave a special greeting to our Sylvansport GO waiting patiently in the garage, now that we’ve experienced again the challenges of tent camping. We hope to have many more adventures with it. Thanks for sharing this one with us!

Montana has an unusual monument that captures a unique history: the smelter of the Anaconda Copper Company. It is one of the tallest free-standing brick structures in the world. It is 585 feet tall and was completed 1919. The inside diameter is 75 feet at the bottom, tapering to 60 feet at the top.

The stack dominates the landscape just like the company once dominated the area’s economic life. Since the smelter closed in 1980, the stack has become a symbol of the challenges that face communities dependent on finite resources.

One of the smoke stack’s claim to fame is that the Washington Monument would fit inside the stack’s brick portion (except for their lowest 100 feet where an overlap of as much as one foot at each corner would occur.)

The Anaconda Smoke Stack has been something that we have tried to fit into our route whenever we are in this part of Montana, but we’ve always missed it. One less item now on our bucket list!