Confusion and, conclusion?

I'm confused.

 

Not about what we're doing, but about how to reflect it all here in this blog.

 

There's so much to catch up on going way back to November, there's what we've been doing lately to report on and then there are other events, unrelated to our specific travels, that have deeply touched our lives.

 

I think what I might try to do right now is catch you up on what is happening right now and then as time goes by, go back and report on our adventures that got us to this point in time.

 

We are officially home again.  Well, in Boulder County, Colorado anyway.  As of yesterday afternoon, we have officially come full circle!  I can't believe it.  I remember wondering as we were driving out last year how fast this upcoming year of adventure would actually go by.  Well, I'm here to tell you that it has gone by in a flash!  A very fast moving slideshow of events, people and places.  It's absolutely shocking to think we've made it a full year and here we are right back where we started again.  Geographically speaking that is.  In every other aspect we are so so very far removed from where we started......It's amazing what a year on the road, with all its unpredictability, will do for your own personal human growth and development as well as that of your family.

 

Geographically, we've experienced:  Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, NY - state and city, New England - Maine mostly, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California!

 

I skipped the 'in between' states in this list since we just drove through them so I can't really claim we've experienced them.  Looking at the list it kind of amazes me that that's 'all' we've done.  It's been a year after all, but we did spend over a month and even two in some of those states, so I guess that explains things somewhat.

 

So yes, we're home now.  Or like I said, in our home county at least.  We're not yet quite sure what the upcoming year holds for us.  We have rented out our house for an additional year so we have plenty of flexibility and some decision making to do as to what we want to happen.  One big lesson we learned this year is to wait and see.  We've learned that the answers comes when you ask the right questions and when you just let things happen, or flow, if you like.  We learned that not every step in life, even the big ones, needs planning weeks, months or even years in advance.  We've learned to trust.  We've learned to listen. And we've learned to act on what we hear, see and feel.  We've learned a lot and like I said, we've grown tremendously.

 

So where does that leave us?  I don't have an answer to that.  Yet.

 

What I do know is that we'll hang around here for the next month enjoying friends and our old stomping grounds, and then?  Who knows.  We have options and we are letting them digest and process.  Who knows what may come along down the road or around the corner......

 

Whatever happens though, we'll keep you posted!

 

In the meantime I'll be going back in time to fill you in on all we've done between November and now and try to stick to the chronological order of events to the best of my ability.  The purpose of the blog was, after all, to be our travel journal that we share with all of those who are interested.  Thank goodness I take a million pictures that guide me in the blog writing process!  I also have a couple of other topics, unrelated to our travels, that need reporting on and I'll likely start with those.

 

See you in the next post!

 

:-)

Ethan Allen, military hero or drunken thug? 10.12.10

Oh, the people we run into and the stories they tell.....

More on that in a bit.

First, after our little mishap in Syracuse, we ended up having a beautiful, well deserved if you ask me, drive through the Adirondack Mountains of upstate NY.  We had not expected such beauty!  Wow!


We stopped to 'take care of business' and stretch our legs along this sparkling lake -




We took picture after picture of gorgeous fall foliage -

I have to admit, the Adirondack mountains are way way more beautiful than I imagined.  I'm impressed.  And that statement doesn't come easily from someone who loves the beauty of the west so much.

Once we arrived in the town of Ticonderoga we were greeted with red coats



And blue coats



At almost every corner.

I think we must be in revolution land or something.....


Finally, we saw our destination up ahead -



Ah yes, a fort.  Fun fun for the boys and a bunch of good ol' history for us all.  On the way up btw, the kids watched Liberty's Kids for about the gazillionth time.  We pulled in just as the appropriate episode about Ethan Allen taking the fort came to an end.  I have to admit, the kids weren't the only ones watching.  I kept trying to lean back and watch, not easy from the front seat, but I love watching it too!  And I learn from it.  I've never had the pleasure of taking American History in school so never really learned this stuff.  Though maybe it's better I never learned it in school, I probably would have been turned off of it!  Anyway, it's surprisingly historically accurate I've come to realize.  If you haven't seen it, or heard of it, and you or your children want to learn about American History in a fun way, I can't recommend it enough.  My kids love it and can pretty much tell you all about the revolution, start to finish, thanks primarily to this show.

Once inside, more amazing fall colors greeted us - this time in combination with Lake George.  Put the two together and WOW!



OK, let's back up in history and talk about what this place is.

First of all, for at least 6000 years the Indigenous population farmed, fished and hunted in this area.  The Iroquois called this place Ticonderoga, which means 'the place between the waters'.

What waters?  The significance of geography here is key as IT is why fort after fort was built here.  This location overlooks Lake George and Lake Champlain.  If you want to control the route between the St. Lawrence river (today's Montreal) in Canada and the Hudson river (today's NY) in the US, you want your people sitting right here where they have command over who comes in and out.

So who were fighting for control?  Well, first the French in Canada used this corridor to attack the Mohawks.  Soon after that, in 1667, the French built a trading post here. Much later, in 1755 the French built an actual fort here to assure its control of the area.  At that point the fight for control was between the French and the British.  In 1759 the French abandoned the fort and the British finally took over.

In 1775, during the American Revolution, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys took the fort from the British.  If you believe the history books, this was a highly strategic middle of the night surprise attack on the fort.  The British didn't see it coming and the fort was taken without a single shot being fired.  Command was simply handed over when it was demanded.  Those last two sentences are true, but...here's what we learned from a chance meeting with a local high school history teacher here at the fort....

Ethan Allen was really no more than a rowdy gang leader.  His Green Mountain Boys were a bunch of thugs who spent most of their time drinking late into the night and causing a ruckus everywhere they went.  Well, that fateful night Mr. Allen got drunk, per usual, and basically said, 'Hey! Let's go raid the fort, its got all kinds of wine in the cellar!'  Yes, he was after the liquor...Well, he was lucky.  The British force was on the smaller side and not very 'well put together'.  Taking the fort was easy, as history shows us.  Seeing how easy it was, Mr. Allen got drunk, again, and decided to raid another fort, again.  This time it was Montreal and this time he wasn't so lucky and was caught by the British.

But, details shmetials!  The capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys was the first victory for the revolution and hence, highly significant.  I guess we can forgive his drunken stupor....and general nasty behavior.

BTW, most of the canons here at the fort were taken that winter down to Boston to help the desperate General Washington fight off the British.  So you see, the fort really did make a significant contribution to the revolution.  Who knows what would have happened otherwise....

OK, back to the timeline.  The British took the fort back two years later, the Americans then tried unsuccessfully to recapture it a couple months later, and finally, the British abandoned it.  Once abandoned, most of the fort was taken apart brick by brick by the locals (as opposed to the natives) for their own building needs.  In 1816 a Mr. Pell acquired the fort and his descendants began the restoration process.  The fort was opened to the public in 1909.

Whew! That's the history in a nutshell.  Oh, but wait, there's more!

From our friendly history teacher we also learned that the fort wasn't exactly built in the smartest fashion.  One could actually see into into it from the nearby hills!  How dumb is that?!  Well, the French, those silly original builders, and everyone else, ended up digging 8 foot trenches to hide behind outside the fort and fighting their battles from the outside instead of from inside.  Guess the fort was mainly used for storage!

And so ends our little history lesson.  Boy, I tell you, if we didn't end up staying 'till after closing and that teacher wouldn't have been there with his track team we would have missed the punch line of this whole heroic saga!  BTW, we started talking to him because he needed to lock the place up and we were holding him up.  So, we started chatting, of course.  The kids soon shared their knowledge about the area and the history and he, being a history teacher, jumped all over it.  He would have stopped sharing but Analyzer kept asking questions and expressing interest.  He was so animated and is obviously so absolutely passionate about history and teaching it, it made me jealous of his students!  I wish I had a history teacher like that way back when.  Wait, I did. One.  One among many.  The rest were boooorrrriiinnngggg....

Getting back to the fort here,


Cannons and more cannons, told you it'd be fun for the boys!  They jumped into, onto and around every cannon they possibly could.  Some of these are o-l-d.  We're talking cannons from 1724, 1780, 1794 and such.  OK, not Greek or Roman or anything, but for this country, old.



The fort has what's called the Education Center.  There was a brief film about the fort and then an extensive display about the history.  I have to say though, it was way too wordy.   Yes, it had artifacts and life size Mohawk Indians and soldiers, but the walls were simply covered in writing to the point where it was just too much to follow along with in such a setting.





Heading back outside there were of course more and more cannons....



Will the joy never cease?!



Inside the fort walls are more significant exhibits relating the the era and the location.

Ahh! Here's more coolness, Ethan Allen's gun and sword!!





They even had some hands on activities for the youngest among us - design your own fort!



Now this little guy has an interesting history and has been to some, um, interesting places.....it's a capsule that contained a message for 'the other side'.  The messenger, realizing he was caught, swallowed it as ordered so that the message would not be read by the wrong people.   Unfortunately for him, the message was 'retrieved', read and he was subsequently hung.....



We saw many many powder horns.....



Drums, we learned, were not just for 'fun'.   Different 'beatings' signaled different messages or announcements: work, mealtime, bedtime etc.  There were beatings for different marches and approaches as well.  They basically regulated life in the camp and at war.



We met with a colonial soldier while touring the museum which was cool,



We saw a trundle bed belonging to Benedict Arnold -



Various artifacts belonging to George and Martha Washington -



We got to hold a musket and see how heavy it really was.  Pretty darn heavy!



And of course, we examined the diorama depicting Ethan Allen easily taking the fort.



The tour of the fort finally came to an end and as the kids waited for me to make dinner they had the opportunity to do something they never really get to do -



Climb onto a school bus!

The bus that brought the high schoolers to their track meet was parked right next to us.  Oohhh how exciting!  Or so it seemed.  After requesting permission, the kids clamored aboard, sat, wandered up and down the aisle and then got off.  Duly impressed they were not.

Good.  ;-)

Darkness was fast approaching and we had more driving to do.  We needed to get ourselves almost halfway though VT that night if we were going to make it to Maine on time to meet the in-laws tomorrow night!

The black hills are indeed pretty black. When you're driving through them at 10PM.....

OK.  This post went up by accident a couple days ago, but since it only had a sentence in it, obviously it was not ready to be published.  My apologies!  So here we go -

This, on the off chance you haven't experienced it for yourself, is what "I'm tired, I'm pissy and leave me alone" looks like, at 10 o'clock at night and nowhere near a place to settle down....



So what happened?  Well, like I said yesterday, we had a plan.  Our mistake was trying to stick to it like glue.  Bad bad idea.

By the time we left Devils Tower it was almost dark.  Stupid.  Every time I think about it feel like smacking my forehead.  I'll try to get over it so I can through this post without repeating myself a million times.  Luckily tummies were full, so that wasn't an issue at least.  The drive out of northeastern WY is a beautiful one.  You know the pictures you see of the Sundance film festival?  Well, it's pure ranch land beauty.  Unfortunately, our view of it was short lived since it got dark fast.  No more view.  Good reason number one why not to travel at night.  Reason number two, as we crossed into South Dakota I couldn't get a picture of the welcome sign.  OK, not a terrible event in itself, but a bummer for our collection.

So, here we are, heading towards Deadwood, SD.  We were told there was a casino there we could spend the night in (the parking lot that is) and then the next day we were going to do some sightseeing, including a great free museum a friend highly recommended.  Deadwood BTW was a wild gold mining town frequented by Wild Bill Hickock, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, etc.

Driving, driving, driving, we finally made it to the town.  It was somewhere around 9PM already.

We located the casino but did not see anywhere one could park an RV.  After driving around the small town for a while, trying to figure out which end is up, S situated us in a public lot across the street from the casino and went in search of some info.  We waited in the car, parked along what I assume was a beautiful gulch and river.  All I could make of it was that there was a gulch there of some sort, but like I said, it was dark.  Returning to the car, S informed us that indeed there was free RV parking, but it was full.  And no, there was nowhere else in town to boondock (the term for dry camping, in this case free too) other than a large lot on the outskirts of town that we had ruled out already since it was fairly creepy.

What to do?!  by this point it was 9:30PM.  Another decision needed to be made.  We googled and found several campgrounds in the area, some close by some further out.  So, off we went in search of them.  The ones closer in were full.  As we proceeded south getting further and further away from Deadwood, we came across various campgrounds that were closed for the season already.  We also managed to cruise right by some that we didn't see in time to actually stop.  At some point we got so far away from Deadwood that we made the executive decision to not go back the next day and simply head on to Rapid City where we knew there was a Walmart waiting for us.  We were now looking at another 45 minutes of driving.....Some of the natives of the backseat had zonked out.  Some were trying but not succeeding and were therefore spending quite a bit of time whining and complaining....

All this driving, from WY to Rapid City, took us through the Black Hills.  A beautiful mountainous and heavily forested area.  I can say that now, after I've actually seen it in the daylight.  During our initial drive through them though we could not see a thing.  And they were indeed truly BLACK.  Reiterating reason number one for not driving at night.....

So.  Finally made it to Rapid City!  Hallelujah!  Yikes.........A big city in all it's glory (OK, relatively speaking!).  Noisy, crowded, dirty.  People people everywhere....This is not a criticism of Rapid City, just of big cities period.  We are not fans in case you didn't know.  We were extra thankful for our Walmart that night though, even if it was one of the more restless nights we've had to date.  Having the sweeper come through in the wee hours of the morning is not fun.

The drama of the evening was over and now that the next day had dawned we had some things we needed to accomplish.  And deal with.

To wrap up here though, we learned five valuable lessons from all this:

1.  Don't insist on sticking to a plan just because you made it.  That's just plain silly.
2.  If it's late in the afternoon or even evening already, for heaven's sake find a place and STOP!
3.  Avoid driving at night if you want to enjoy the view......DUH!
4.  Kids will eventually beg to crawl into their beds cause they're so gosh darn tired.
5.  Said kids whine a lot when it's late and they're tired.  Another DUH!

Moving day

There was more of Cody we still had to squeeze in before we headed east though.

Not to be missed, supposedly, was an extensive and detailed miniature wild west diorama!



It ran from the early American Indians up until the days of Buffalo Bill's show.  It included ancient Indians and their ways of life pre horses, later Indians -



Settlers, forts and battles -

The coming of the railroad (complete with a train you could operate inside the diorama), gold mining towns, cattle drives, etc. There was an audio explanation of it all along with some reading materials.

The mini museum, situated in the back of a gift shop btw, also included an extensive selection of Native American and pioneer artifacts.  We apparently were not tired of these things even after our two days at the Buffalo Bill historical Center. Go figure.

Finally, we were ready to leave Cody! And it's about time, given that our initial plan was to stay 3 days max and here we were on day 6.....

Stopping on our way out of town to dump (a necessity before beginning a long drive and a good idea anyway), some of us had lunch in the car, grumpy faces and all, while S was busy, um, relieving the RV. While there, another RV pulled up to do the same and the two men (it always seems to be the man. Not complaining here...) sat and chatted while their respective RVs were emptying out.  A cute scene.

Driving from Cody to Gillette, our next scheduled stop on our way to Devils Tower and South Dakota, we passed through dry desert, gorgeous canyons and very winding roads going down and then up said canyons.  The beauty was surprising!

We also passed through an important landmark for some of you, you know who you are, so I figured it deserved a shot of it's own :-)

See you in Gillette!

 

 

Hellllll-ooooo Yellowstone!

The drive from Teton to Yellowstone is pretty short, about 40 minutes to the south enterance.  We toyed with the idea of going around through the back on the Tetons and Idaho, but due to the weather combined with a serious mountain pass along that route, we elected to take the potentially much slower drive through the park.  


For those who don't know, getting through Yellowstone can be challenging since getting stuck in so called buffalo, elk, bear, moose, etc. jams are a sure thing.  During busy seasons these jams can double the time it takes to get form point A to point B in the park.  If you're lucky.  We had timed our visit with the start of school hoping the park would be significantly less crowded than during the summer.  And it was.  But it's all relative.  There were still plenty of people.


At the entrance to the park we were greeted with this happy and enthusiastic ranger who had come up with an original way to hand items back and forth to people.  We just had to take her picture.  We weren't the first, everyone does it seems :-)




We had finally made it into Yellowstone!!


Temperatures were dropping, it was raining, but we were happy.  That is, until we noticed that those rain drops were turning to ice...and then snow.....YIKES!!  We were driving in the park, on narrow winding roads, pulling our behemoth....in the SNOW!!!  We, obviously, weren't quite sure about all this....So, we stopped at the first ranger station we came across and asked about pulling ourselves up and over the fast approaching mountain pass in the park....Happily, we were informed that it'll be ok.  The snow's not sticking, and won't, and the pass is not so bad (easy for him to say I guess, but hopefully he knew what he was talking about!).


So we continued on our journey heading to West Yellowstone where we would camp outside the park.  We were told that few campgrounds in the park would accommodate our size and that those spots available were few and far between.  Not to mention EXPENSIVE! This is Yellowstone after all.


The drive ended up not being bad at all and we made it through the pass! Once over it we hit the Old Faithful visitor's center to grab Jr. Ranger and Jr. Scientist booklets.  We only got 1 of each since, like everything else in the park, they were expensive.  Relative to the free ones we're accustomed to anyway.....The kids would share the work and the patches.  They'll live.


We were lucky enough to come in within minutes of Old Faithful's scheduled eruption!  Great timing and a nice beginning to our tour of the park, especially given the weather we arrived in.




The next day's weather was still pretty lousy so we elected to stay at the campground, move to an electrical site (!!!!) and keep busy inside.  That meant playing, starting our Jr. Ranger and scientists books.....


...AND enjoying a visit from a CO friend and her kids!!  Miss Tiff, from over at freeplaylif.com, is also our former creative math club leader (she's pretty incredible at coming up with ways to make anything and everything math related, well actually, anything really, amazingly fun!)





She now lives in CA but makes a yearly pilgrimage to Yellowstone and we happen to be here at the same time.  Soooo lucky for us!! It was short but sweet and a nice touch of home.  We'll be seeing her and her gang again once we hit CA to be sure!

West Yellowstone, BTW, is in....




Ever since I saw 'A River Runs Through It' (years and years ago...) I've wanted to be in Montana!  Despite zigzagging in and out of Montana on this Yellowstone trip (the west, north and northeast enterences are in Montana even though the park is primarily in WY) we won't count it as our 4th state (I think that's the number we're up to anyway...).  Since we didn't really explore it, or even see more than a few miles of it, it's not making the official list.  Sorry Montana - see you on our way back though next year!  Glacier National Park is on the list.


OK, back to the present though.


Where was I?


Oh, yeah.  We're in Yellowstone and planning our sightseeing expeditions.


Tomorrow, we begin!