Newton Falls, OH

We made it  to Newton Falls, OH last night and are in the Budget Lodge Motel - only $51, incld. tax. We got here at about 10p.m. It is in eastern Ohio near the PA border, not very far from Lordstown, where GM recently closed a huge plant. Not sure what the plan is today - Swarthmore or Vermont? Could go either way. Stay tuned!

Later:
Sounds like the "stars are not aligned" for a visit to Swarthmore this time. So I think we are Vermont-bound. We'll probably get in pretty late, but we won't have to build a fire in the stove and get the house warm! 

Our "minimalist" room at the Budget Lodge Inn

 

Remember Dick Haymes?

We talked about Dick Haymes, the crooner from the 1940s, tonight. Maggie had put a picture of the "Dick Haymes Fan Club" on the bureau in our bedroom - a picture of her and the daughters of a high school friend who was a Dick Haymes fan, plus Becky and Suzy.  I recall Shirley saying she liked Dick Haymes and went into the city with her high school friend, Jane, to a Dick Haymes concert. Maggie gave me a copy of a movie ad for The Shocking Miss Pilgrim with Dick Haymes and Betty Grable. It's actually available for free on YouTube. We could watch it. But probably not tonight.

Dick Haymes

The Dick Haymes 2 Fan Club

We made it to Bartlett

It was a long drive from Sioux Falls, SD to Bartlett, IL. We probably should have tried to leave the motel a bit earlier; as it was we left at about 10a.m., and we felt a bit under pressure. I started us out on Iowa, Rte. 9 which goes across the northern border. My thought was that we might be able to go down through Spillville, IA on our way to Dubuque, and visit the Dvorak Museum there. But we soon realized that there would be no time for that if we were going to get to Bartlett at a reasonable hour, and in  fact, we needed to get on to a faster road. So we went south to Rte. 18 and then, eventually, to U.S. 20, which is four-lane highway much of the way across Iowa. And then we just kept going, stopping only for gas and snacks. We got to Bartlett at 7:45p.m., which was a bit later than we had originally hoped, but not too bad. Maggie and Jerry welcomed us with ice cream bars!

Our "entertainment" in the car took four forms: (1) my reading aloud from Jill Lepore's These Truths, which continues to be a fascinating read; (2) listening to Teaching Company lectures on the history of food; (3)listening to NPR; and (4) listening to music. These Truths is a history of the US which focuses on the conflict between the founding principles of equality and freedom and the reality of slavery, and how that played out in virtually every aspect of American life. The period we were reading about yesterday was the Jacksonian period, a time eerily like the present!  The food history was dealing with the period of the Romans, early Christians and the beginnings of Islam. And the CD I pulled out at random was a 2010 Blanche Moyse Chorale concert which featured several pieces by Schubert, and Mendelsohn's Die Erste Walpurgisnacht. I don't remember ever having listened to the CD before, and had very fuzzy memories of singing in the concert! I had to look up the Chorale History on the computer to be reminded of details like, who was playing the piano? Turned out that Robbie Merfeld was playing the Schubert and the Mendelsohn was a piano 4-hand duo, two very accomplished Chinese students that Mary Westbrook-Geha knew.  It all seems like a long time ago.

Becky is coming over tonight; everyone else in the family is either busy or away. Maggie has eye surgery Monday morning, and needs Sunday to get ready, so we will leave Sunday morning.

Later:
We had a yummy supper ordered in from Pasta Mia with various veggie options and BBQ ribs. Followed by chocolate pie. Becky brought fruit and a strawberry rhubarb pie which will be for breakfast. We had a good talk with Becky. They are going to be removing asbestos this week from the attic at "Whitewood" - where Becky lives (Stewart's old house)  -  sort of scary but necessary. It will be done by "pros" - but you have to sort of feel for them, especially in hot, humid weather. Suzy and Dennis' house is on the market, but no offers as yet. If they actually end up selling the house and moving to Everett, WA where their son Ryan is - and Alicia and sweet little Ireland - they are really going to be missed here! Hard to even imagine after all these years. But nothing stays the same forever.

We may return via Swarthmore - we're checking.

Amazing!

When we left Lemmon, SD yesterday morning, I realized that we were not very far from LaPlant, SD, which is where a group from the Guilford Community Church, both youth and adults, including our pastor, Lise Sparrow, is currently on a two-week trip working with the Lakota tribe there to help provide a program for children. This is something that they have been doing every summer for several years. I thought it would be neat to see if we could find them. I sent Lise an email, giving her a heads-up that we might visit, and we set out. LaPlant was about two hours  away, but on our way back east, so we headed there to see what we could find. I checked my email, but no response from Lise. We drove into LaPlant, a tiny town, and stopped at the first place where there seemed to be people - and there they were! The whole group! Part of the group, including our friend, Terry Sylvester, was just about to leave on a swimming trip in the nearby Missouri River, but Lise stayed behind and gave us a quick tour. We learned a lot which I will try to share in future posts, but basically they are working alongside Lakota adults, helping to enable a very positive, nurturing experience for Lakota children whose families are desperately poor and dealing with multiple issues. They have helped build a beautiful playground, a greenhouse, enlarged the community building, and now a village of six houses is being built which will house Lakota children who would otherwise go into foster care with white families, but in this village will live with Lakota "parents and grandparents" and thus be raised in their Lakota traditions. The UCC denomination has played an important role in this (a UCC church will be a part of this village), including returning land to the Lakota tribe which had been acquired a century ago when the Congregationalists first started to do mission work among the Lakota people. The village will be built on that land. Another inspiration for this village is the work and philosophy of Geoffrey Canada, and the Harlem Children's Zone - more on that later.

I got some pictures, but my iPhone camera suddenly started acting very strangely. Images were faded out and blurry, and the phone would start taking scores of pictures all on its own without my even touching it! Weird!  And on top of that, my blog refuses to recognize those photos in the iPhoto archive. I've salvaged a few and enhanced them.

Terry Sylvester on her way for a swim

Pastor Lise

The new greenhouse

The dorm where the group lives. The mural is a work in progress and was designed by Terry Sylvester

We spent the night last night in a Microtel Inn and Suites in Sioux Falls, SD. On to Bartlett, IL!

Lemmon, SD

Tonight we are in Lemmon, SD. We had a lovely visit to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, then drove down US 85 to Rte 12 and over to Lemmon. It is late and I don't have time for an extensive post tonight, but here are a couple of photos:

Theodore Roosevelt N.P.

another view in TRNP

Petrified wood park in Lemmon, SD - a totally weird, amazing place

More on this later!

We took a very nice evening walk around Lemmon and ran into this park. It was created about when I was born - a depression era creation. It is totally unique. Here's an article:

Petrified Wood Park

"Lemmon, a town along the upper reaches of South Dakota, is justly proud of their Petrified Wood Park. Bigger than the classic post cards suggest, the tourist attraction fills an entire city block in the heart of downtown. Recent renovations and careful maintenance make this one of the better manicured rock sculpture parks.

 

Petrified Wood Park was built from 1930-32 by town men under the command of visionary Ole S. Quammen. "Thirty to forty otherwise unemployed men received sustenance during this period," explains a sign at the site. Quammen, an amateur geologist, had the men scavenge rocks and fossils from the vicinity and haul them back to Lemmon. Their labors yielded a castle, a wishing well, a waterfall, the Lemmon Pioneer Museum, and hundreds of pile sculptures-- all made of petrified wood.

The park became city property in 1954 when it was donated by Quammen's heirs. A plaque honors "Ole S. Quammen, father of Mrs. Harry C. Olson, the creator and donor of this, the world's largest petrified wood park of its kind." In 2002, extensive repairs and renovations restored the park to its Depression Era glory. While we were there, someone official looking was watering the grass between the rock cones.

 

A hundred conical sculptures are spread around the park at sizes up to 20-ft. tall. Some are made from petrified wood and others from spherical "cannonballs" -- round rocks from North Dakota's Cannonball River. The tree effect adds to the eerie illusion of a petrified forest, especially since it's artificially constructed in this mostly treeless region of the northern plains. The "trees" are decorated with Christmas lights for an annual holiday "Fantasyland" display.

A building referred to as "the Castle" was crafted from a variety of petrified wood and thousands of pounds of petrified dinosaur and mammoth bones. Inside a room with a gate and spires, dinosaur bones masoned into interior walls"

Lemmon is, or was, also home to Kathleen Norris, theologian and author of Dakota, Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace and other  fine works. The town as it presents itself today, does not appear to be a place that would be interested in the things she has written. But of course that may be a mis-apprehension. 

Sidney, MT

This morning, we are in Sidney, MT after spending the night here in a Richmond Inn and Suites motel. We drove from Billings, MT to Sidney, but we made a major stop at Pompey's Pillar National Monument. We had never heard of it, and were curious, so we checked it out. It was both very interesting historically and a beautiful place to spend some time. We were loath to leave.

Pompey's Pillar is a large, 150-foot-high outcropping of sandstone next to the Yellowstone River. On July 25, 1806, Capt. William Clark, of Lewis & Clark fame, was canoeing up the Yellowstone on his way to reconnoiter with Lewis and his party who were further upstream at the confluence with the Missouri River, and  he was struck by this prominent feature. He landed and climbed up the mound, and carved his name into the sandstone, with the date. He named the mound after Sacagewea's son Pompy, of whom he was very fond. He probably recognized as well that it was important to the Crow people, and contains many petroglyphs. Clark, who was a meticulous journalist, made extensive notes on what he did and saw that day, which led others to the spot. Subsequent research by scientists has revealed that this mound bears evidence of 11,000 years of human activity. It was named a N.M. in 2001, and a new Interpretive Center was built in 2006. A commodious  stairway was constructed to the top, and by golly, I climbed it. I don't know how many steps, but it was a lot. I guess if it's 150 feet high, and a stair riser is about 6 inches, there must've been 300 steps. And just as many coming down! At the top I met a 76-year old amateur historian who was eager to share the history of the place with anyone interested in listening, which I was. From the top you got a 360 degree view which was magnificent. And of course on the way up there is a special platform from which to view Clark's inscription, covered with bulletproof glass (because so many patriotic Americans were taking pot-shots at it). Hundreds of other patriots have carved their initials  into the rock, in some cases disfiguring early Native-American sacred signs. I guess the Park Service has put an end to that. Places like this raise so many issues and questions concerning our country - like manifest destiny, our relationship to Native-American people's both historically and now, and how they are to be represented in a monument such as this, both historically and now. The Park Service is at least somewhat aware of those issues. I think it is important to have monuments such as this, just because they force us to deal with and think about those issues.

There was a lot we could have seen and done there - we could have stayed much of the day. But we had to keep moving, so we left, and pushed on eastward on I-94. As we got closer to the South Dakota border it began to rain, and got quite windy as well. This raised questions about what to do on Wednesday and where to spend the night. We had to stop and work through all that, and finally decided to stay here in Sidney, which puts us in a convenient place to go to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt N.P today. I think going to Isle Royale N.P. tomorrow is out of the question at this point. Just too much. We got our supper tonight at a Reynolds Super Market which proved to be quite good and very reasonable. And our room is quite nice too. And the window opens - fresh air without a fan - which is quite unusual. We watched PBS News and a American Experience special on the moon landing which was fascinating. So many things we knew nothing of the time. E.g., who knew about Ed Dwight who was the first African-American pilot to train as an astronaut, whose skill got him into the final group of 14, and whom Bobby Kennedy really wanted to be sent on a space mission, but who was probably dropped from the program because his involvement offended southern senators who chaired Senate committees that funded NASA. He could have been the "Neil Armstrong person."

The Interpretive Center at Pompey's Pillar

Pompey's Pillar.  Top: from the base; Bottom: from the air

Clark's inscription - under protective glass

View of Yellowstone River from the top of Pompey's Pillar

Model of Capt. William Clark

The eating area at Reynold's super market - with history on the wall

Snow!

We came over the Beartooth highway today and as we went up, the temperature dropped to 35 degrees and we were back in winter scenes! It obviously had snowed hard earlier  today - thank goodness not while we were driving. There was still slush on the road and road signs were all still plastered with snow and ice.

Snow galore

This is July 8th?

We had hoped to see wildflowers up on the pass. We did - encased in snow!

Poor little guys

To go back - we said our tearful goodbyes to Paul, Jenny and Max at about 8a.m. this morning, and headed up to Jackson and then on to Grand Teton Park and Yellowstone. We learned one thing: don't go into the Parks on the days following the 4th of July! It was a zoo. Can't complain I guess - we were part of the problem. We headed up to Roosevelt in Yellowstone - one of the less frequented places - and it was a zoo too! We looked for a picnic table to have our lunch from the food box - they were all full everywhere. We finally found one in the Lamar Valley past Roosevelt - the parking lot was full (usually, no one is there), but we found one empty table. But there were still lovely scenes along the way.

Grand Moran in the Tetons

The aftermath of fire

This lone bison had attracted hundreds of people!

The Yellowstone River in one of its quieter moments

You go through Cooke City, MT after you leave Yellowstone Park before heading up the Beartooth Highway. Ellen found postcards at this old country store in Cooke City:

Cooke City General Store

And of course, there are spectacular views on the Beartooth Highway, snow or no snow:

Beartooth vistas

 We had a reservation in Billings at a Motel 6 for a non-smoking room, but when we got there, they had one room left and it was a smoking room, despite the reservation.We checked it out and it was unacceptable. So we gave up on Motel 6 and came to Super 8 - for $30 more! Oh well!