Backroads Journal
Paralleling Route 66 to California
By the time you read this we will actually be home from our epic road trip to California that covered over 4,000 miles and three weeks in September. I had planned to update the web site on the road, but due to some technical issues, it had to wait until our return. I will admit […]
Inflation! Recession! REVOLUTION!
OK. OK. I know gas prices are high and going higher and this is a travel web site based on driving. It is obvious that things are going to change. Like it or not, we all will be seeing changes in our lifestyles. We can either hunker down and gripe about Big Oil and the […]
Exploring Door County
Lighthouses, cherry orchards, art galleries, sand dunes, country inns, rustic farms and rugged coastline, it’s all, and more, in Door County, Wisconsin. Each year, it seems like, we venture up the peninsula of Wisconsin that protrudes into Lake Michigan, forming Green Bay on the west shoreline and standing stoutly, like its early settlers, to Lake […]
Passages
Passages…We all have times in our lives that stand out as a passage from one set of life circumstances to another. Sometimes they are planned and sometimes they take us by surprise. I have just gone through a passage in my life that I had planned for many years. On New Years Day I made […]
The Road to Steamboat Lake
Just itching to get away from the family gathering for a sanity break, we grabbed a couple of hours and followed a route written up in a local magazine west and north from Steamboat Springs, Colorado. County Road 129 leaves US40 about one mile west of Steamboat and follows the Elk River through some of […]
The Fraser River Valley, Colorado
Rolling down off of Colorado’s Berthoud Pass on US40 I could feel the tension of the Denver/I-70 drive melting away. I have always lived in Kansas, but each summer my family would load up the sedan or the wagon and head for the mountains for our summer camping vacation. For two glorious weeks, my sister […]
Covered Bridges and a Step Back in Time
If you yearn for a deep breath of earthy, Midwestern farmland air and a leisurely meander around one of the most photo-op friendly counties in Indiana, take a step back in time and tour the Covered Bridge Capital of the World, also known as Parke County, Indiana. We had often read about Parke County and […]
The Famous Maytag Blue Cheese
If you happen to be near Des Moines, Iowa, venture 22 miles east to Newton (Exit 164 on US 6 and I-80), and take a few minutes to search out the Maytag Blue Cheese factory, just on the north edge of town. Now, we had heard of Maytag Blue Cheese, but until our brother-in-law, Tom, […]
Communing in the Amanas
Hand-quarried sandstone homes with traditional wall-mounted grapevine trellises, hand-crafted baskets and brooms and a four-star golf course. Those some of the reasons we chose Amana, Iowa for a location to meet my sister and her husband for a few days of get-away. It also fit the criteria of being relatively half way between Minnesota and […]
Autumn in the Hills
One crisp, clear autumn afternoon found us heading north on one of our favorite clear-the-mind routes. Rolling up through the Kansas Flint Hills on Highway 177 from Matfield Green, we could feel the pressure of the week melting away. There’s something in the Hills that brings everything into perspective. Maybe it’s the permanence of the […]