Early Stumbles

Well, this is sad. It might be because Michael and our friend got home from doing Michael's radio show and I'm very distracted by conversation and the tv show they're watching, but I am striking out on a good blog topic for today.

So, let me share some of the highlights of our planned drive across the country. There will be links, but no pictures. We'll start out in Lake Tahoe to see the kokanee salmon spawning. Michael and I got to see them seven years ago on our honeymoon and Darcy's excited to see them.

From there, we'll drive across Nevada, stopping to see Great Basin National Park for a few hours. We know some folks who have worked there in the past and we want to hit a bunch of parks on the way. It is kinda middle of nowhere, but that's ok. We'll stay the next night in Moab, which we think might be like Bend ("the place to be"), and spend the next morning in Arches National Park.

As you might be able to tell, I'm trying to find one major activity for each day and then minor stops for stretch breaks as well. From Moab, we'll drive to Denver to visit with our friend Gretel for an evening. We've both driven across Kansas on Interstate 70 before and, no offense meant to Kansas, but we're not keen to do it again. So from Denver, we'll head back up to I-80 and go across Nebraska instead. Kearney, NE, was a cross-roads for most of the major trails west and promises a couple interesting museums. The following morning, we'll skip south to hit Homestead National Monument, with the plowshare-shaped visitors center.

Then comes ST LOUIS!! We'll spend two nights in St Louis! We'll go to Friday Archaeology. We'll take Darcy to the zoo, to MoBot, and possibly to the City Museum.

After St Louis, there are still a couple of great stops of interest. Recalling Darcy's very first obsession, we will be stopping at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park. For those of you who don't know the Wright Brothers history as well as we do, while the first flight was in Kitty Hawk, their airplane was perfected outside of Dayton, OH. We have the Martin-Sheen-narrated film to prove it.

And then, just like that, we'll be arriving in Pennsylvania for house-hunting, start of work, and the transition to a new school. (Whew! With half an hour left in this day, I have a post! I'm going to try my best to get a picture a day while we're travelling, so you WILL get images of all these places.)