Quick Thoughts on a Road Trip West: Up High, Down Below

Traveling Glacier Park's Going to the Sun Road makes one feel on top of the earth. Walking among Yellowstone Park's geothermal features makes one feel uncomfortably close to earth's nethermost regions. Either place, one is may be forgiven for feeling small and powerless in the face of overwhelming geological forces. One may also be expected, no matter what his or her religious convictions, to feel the force of the Psalmist's question: "What is humanity that you–God–should pay any attention at all to us?"

Am I wrong in thinking Yellowstone Park is like no place else on earth? I don't care; I like thinking that. After a day mostly spent exploring thermal pools and geysers and the like we visited the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It took our breath away in a way that perhaps only the other Grand Canyon might do. On our drive back to our room we saw bison and elk and one pronghorn grazing in vast valleys cut by glaciers and rivers, almost the way nature meant them to feed. Our planet is writ large in Yellowstone, and complex, and vulnerable, too. Awe strikes unawares, and even massive buildings such as the Old Faithful Inn cannot compete.

What's been the most impressive and moving site or experience on this Road Trip West? About that I have to think much harder than I have energy to think at the end of our last full day of sight-seeing. (We will perhaps drive by the Tetons on our way east tomorrow, but do not have time to explore them...everyone has to head home eventually.) A summary post will no doubt follow as I process and feel it all. Meantime, thanks for coming along for this ride.

Quick Thoughts on a Road Trip West: A River Runs Through It

I-90 from Spokane WA through the Idaho panhandle and well into Montana may be the most spectacular interstate highway I've ever traveled. The road follows long-followed routes between tree-covered mountains, races up and down spectacular passes, and grants one astonishing view after another  of this grand corner of our planet.

The highway weaves around the Clark Fork River for many miles as it approaches Missoula, the main setting of Norman Maclean's short novel, A River Runs Through It. Its story is based upon Maclean's growing up in Missoula, where his Presbyterian-minister father taught him how to fly fish and how to write. Many of my minister friends saw and loved the film Robert Redford made of A River Runs Through It about twenty years ago. It so moved me that I bought and read the book itself and about wore out the CD of the sound track. I think reading that book was the first time in my life that I read something and said to myself, "I want to write like that guy writes." It turned me on to writing as an art, not just as a means of sharing information.

A River Runs Through It also touched me, I think, because my brother, Don, was at the time I read it fighting the cancer that eventually took his life. I identified with Norman, who could do nothing to help his brother, Paul (played by a relatively unknown young actor named Brad Pitt), in his struggle against a very different illness.

I went on to read all I could find of the rest of Maclean's work. There apparently isn't much: two longer short stories usually published with River; Young Men and Fire that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago; and a book of various writings by and about  Maclean that his colleagues at the University of Chicago put together after his death. That volume includes pieces he was working on about The Battle of Little Big Horn, which I will reread when we get home since I've now been there myself.

So as Maxine drove I-90 nearing Missoula, I Googled "First Presbyterian Missoula Maclean" and learned that in 2009 a monument to Norman's father had been placed in front of the current FPC building (built in 1915). I wondered if we should stop to find it, and Maxine knew I absolutely needed to do that. Map Quest makes these things easy, and five minutes off the freeway we were at the beautifully well-kept brick building, and I was posing beside a large upright stone engraved with a picture of a fly-fisherman about to land a fish from a Montana river (surely the Bitterroot), and this inscription:

"In memory of Dr. John Norman Maclean, pastor of First Presbyterian Church from 1909 to 1925, whose love of God, family and creation inspired the story A River Runs Through It and construction of this sanctuary designed by his friend and church member, Missoula architect A. J. Gibson."

I feel as if my first visit to Montana has been somewhat like the first personal meeting of long-time pen pals. You know one another, and you are eager to experience one another in the flesh, but you are anxious that you won't live up to one another's expectations. That one or both of you might have mislead the other about who you really are. Norman Maclean's writings, however, seem to me to have presented Montana as the bold and beautiful place it really is.

Tonight we sleep in Gardiner MT, just north of the Wyoming state line, and about a mile from the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The next three mornings we will drive through the Roosevelt Arch to explore the wonders of one more spectacular place in our great country. I am very grateful that we can do this, and for all who've made it possible for us to do it...and for family and teachers and writers who gave me the hunger to want to explore and experience so much.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Music to My Ears

While filling up our car with gas today in Spokane, I noticed that a fairly battered white pick-up had parked near me. A man dressed in work clothes got out and went into the store, leaving the windows open and the radio on. What a surprise to hear the music of strings and woodwinds floating out that window...obviously a classical-style chamber work of some kind. When he came out I resisted the temptation to congratulate him on his musical taste; how condescending that would have sounded!

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Family Business

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Family Business

I keep trying to think of something to write about Glacier National Park that may not have been said already by someone, somewhere.  But I am sure the picture I posted on Facebook a couple of days ago and the many other pictures I took before and after it would be the best commentary I could offer.  I guess I will simply take note of what seems like a side issue, but is important to all of our visits to parks and monuments preserved for us and shared with us by the Federal government.

I think Ken Burns called our national parks our government's best idea, and while I can't say that for sure, I am sure they are a darned good idea by our government. From this consumer's experience they are well-run and appropriately shared with us and will hundreds of thousands of visitors from overseas. I can't imagine what they would be like if they'd been left to private enterprise and entrepreneurship. They are beautiful, mostly clearly presented, and offer nearly everyone of nearly all physical abilities a chance to experience them.  They employ highly-dedicated staffs, supplemented by equally-dedicated volunteers. I know not everyone is happy with everything they do, but achieving that would be impossible. Their mission is too big to expect perfection.

Our parks even take global warming/climate change seriously, because they see it happening and they see what it is doing. It would be good for a number of the members of congress to spend some time at the national parks for which they are responsible, although I fear what they might try to do to alter their message about our climate if they knew what was being said. Maybe this is one area of public life where we're better off if they stay locked inside the beltway.

We are now in Spokane WA with our daughter and son-in-law and two granddaughters. The older of them celebrated her 5th birthday in a city park with a bunch of her (and her parents') best friends, and for the last half-hour her 2-year-old sister has been engaged in a fairly predictable end-of-a-big-day meltdown.  But it sounds as if a bath and the girls' patient parents have settled them into sleep mood, and soon all will be quiet so we adults can relax with appropriate drinks after hosting a big party in the 95-degree heat of the day.

In a couple of days we turn around and head back east, seeing Yellowstone en route. Can anything top what we've seen already. Maybe not, but I don't think it will matter.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Miles and miles and miles and miles...

North out of Butte MT, driving the little Prius up the steep, steep grade of I-15, we catch a glimpse of the enormous copper mine that skirts Butte's northern edge.  The land flattens into the familiar high prairie ranch land we've see so much of already, then dips into the valley from which little Helena governs this huge state. North of Helena we come to the Gates of the Mountains, named by Lewis OR Clark (I can't remember which). I look for a memorial to the Mann Gulch fire that occurred in the area in1949, taking the lives of about a dozen young smoke jumpers, and subject of Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire, but it and they seem forgotten on this busy Montana highway in 2013.  We visit the Lewis AND Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, but didn't have time to see the falls themselves, great as they surely are.  (It is almost impossible to imagine how the Corps of Discovery made that journey and learned so much from it.) Then we pass through farmland that makes me think of Iowa-without the cornfields though. Then back to grassland as we head west into the foothills of the Rockies.

You cover a lot of ground fast when you can legally drive 75 mph on the Interstates, 70 on many two-lane roads, and when miles of one-lane construction driving only makes you slow to 65. I ask myself why we can't do that back east, and then realize there's almost no traffic out here compared to New Jersey, just to pick a random example.

Tonight we are ensconced in a lodge just south of Glacier. What vistas of these magnificent mountains we had as we approached them from the east! Now looking forward to two days of seeing this majestic park. Even my cold won't keep me from enjoying it...but don't call me Lewis OR Clark. I'm nowhere near that brave or persistent, even in safe adventures like the one we are now on.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Montana Battles

Our visit to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument took longer and was far more informative and moving than I'd anticipated. There was much to see and more to learn, and I sensed being immersed in both the glory and the shame of our national identity. I thought we'd spend an hour or so at most; we were at the monument nearly four hours.

If you'd asked me before today the difference between the Battle of Little Bighorn and Custer's Last Stand, I'd have had no idea. I always pretty much thought they were the same thing, but now I know the Last Stand was only a part of a larger and longer battle. But the Last Stand became the determinative factor in the outcome. Although the Native Americans won, their victory and our nation's political and economic pressures pushed the federal government to "solve the Indian problem" once and for all. Within a few years of 1876 all tribes were on reservations.  History is always far more complex than our memories make it seem to have been.

Long stretches of semi-arid grassland, then spectacular mountains surrounding green fields, with relatively small (by Eastern standards) cities built upon industrial and agricultural might widely spaced along the way. Montana feels vast in every way. Big Sky and big everything else. But people live and breathe the little things, as the headline in the Livingston MT paper reminded me: "Dog Recovering from Rattlesnake Bite."  The fight for life never ends.

Quick Thoughts from a Road Trip West: Is it Real? Is it True?

Deadwood SD is a wild and wicked Old West Town that thrives on keeping its reputation alive in the 21st century. We went into Mustang Sally's and come out with two iced teas...unsweetened, if you please. It was, after all, 11:00 am, but that didn't seem to matter to some of the other folks wandering Deadwood's Main Street this morning.

Drove up the long hill to Lead (pronounced "Leed" the AAA book says), which seems to be a much quieter sort of place, you could say rising morally above its sister city (they share a high school). But there George Hearst, father of famed publisher William Randolph Hearst, made his fortune through his initial investment in the Homestead Mining Co, setting his son up to become an forerunner of the likes of Rupert Murdock. What is truth? Truth is what sells papers.

Wonderful surprise of the day: on a whim we decided to exit Black Hills via Spearfish Canyon. It's one of the most beautiful scenic drives I've ever driven, and I've driven many, about half of them in the Black Hills in the last two days. I know now why so many people vacation there regularly. I didn't want to leave, and Spearfish Canyon told me that every mile of the way.

Looped north and west toward Devils Tower. Stopped on the way at the one-and-only store in Aladdin WY, pop. 15. Restrooms "out back," marked Cowboys and Cowgirls respectively. Sign tacked to wall near door says owners would like to sell. If you are interested in an investment, I'll send you a picture of the property. It's a sure thing, I'd say...but Maxine says if I go into to it, I will do so alone. Another missed opportunity.

Man to companion at Devils Tower: "Wow, how did they build this thing!" Companion: "No one built it; it's natural." Man: "You don't say." That's a true, overheard exchange, at the base of the 800 foot plus monolith jutting into the Wyoming sky.

Of course, the big question in my mind about Devils Tower is this: Where's the apostrophe? So I asked the ranger in the Visitors' Center and she said it was a clerical error no one ever fixed. Later I saw evidence that seems to support that understanding.

But here's the truth of the matter that came to my mind as we hiked around it: "tower" in the phrase is a verb, not a noun, and "Devils Tower" is short-hand for "The devils tower over us." Don't you think?

Seriously, it should not be called what we call it at all, apostrophe or no, but Native Americans' protests to that effect go unnoticed (natch). They prefer something like "Bear's Den," and tell a story to support that name. We, of course, go our own way, because, you see, devils tower over us, whether we know it or not.

Quick Thoughts from a Road Trip West: Icons on the Mind

As I hinted yesterday, we spent Sunday, July 14, touring South Dakota's Bandlands. It was a cool and damp day, which didn't fit the geography of that place well. But we were able to see most of what we wanted to see, and to take some short hikes into the eerie landscape created by eons of erosion's power.

Late in the day we headed due north to South Dakota's best-known town: Wall. We had to go there, having heard of the siren call of Wall Drug for most of our lives. Something eerie about that place, too...room after room of stuff for sale. How can there be so much stuff in the world, much less in one tiny SD town? I examined $450 cowboy boots and $3 refrigerator magnets and left the place with an ice cream cone. Didn't sit in the Traveler's Chapel (emptiest place there) or wait for the T-Rex to roar at me (which it does every 11 minutes, I believe).

Wall Drug is an iconic American success story, the kind people write books about. It's a family business going back to the 1931 when Ted Hustead came up with the idea of offering free ice water to hot and weary travelers. There's still free cold water (sans ice) in the "back yard," but I doubt anyone stops at Wall Drug for that nowadays.

We arrived at our B and B in Hill City, SD, Sunday evening, ready to begin two full days of touring the Black Hills. And icons suddenly struck me from every direction, around every turn. What is the American west if not "iconic?"

The icon that is Mt. Rushmore is awesome, and I use the word as I like it to be used: awe-inspiring. For one thing, how did they do that? Boggles the mind. Then, everything from the parking area to the entrance area to the evening program preceding the lighting of the faces is carefully coordinated to bring the visitor into the presence of the four great persons behind those stone visages. It's all like entering a holy space.

But the best-laid plans oft go astray: the night we went to see the faces light up was so foggy that when the great lights came on all we could see was...fog. As if heaven conspired to block from view four presidents who lived and acted in ways that seem larger than life. Yes, there really was a time when political leaders–Presidents and all–could act like that, and did. Bold vision, courageous decisions, game-changing policies, well-executed political strategies, faith, luck...of, by and for the PEOPLE. But I digress...

Our most moving view of Mt. Rushmore came late today as we were driving west on Iron Mountain Road, and stopped at the observation area at the top of whatever summit it crosses. There, in the distance, was Mt. Rushmore, visible within the context of the surrounding Black Hills, and we saw how it towers majestically over the landscape and how small those faces now seemed. Context allows the greatness inherent in certain people to flourish.

Another icon is the Crazy Horse Monument, some ten or fifteen miles west of Mt. Rushmore as the crow flies.  Its context is a very large complex of buildings devoted to Native American history, arts, and culture. The monument itself, also being carved upon a granite mountain, is barely begun even though the work has been in progress since 1949. Crazy Horses's face is complete, but his hair and his outstretched arm and the horse on which he rides are nothing but rough rock walls that have been exposed by innumerable explosive blasts. When finished–if it's ever finished–it will dwarf almost every other  human-made thing on earth, including Mt. Rushmore's four Presidential faces.   Are "they" trying to tell "us" something?

Clevelanders may be shocked to learn that Chief Wahoo did not seem to be among the many images of Native American leaders displayed in the Crazy Horse Monument's museum. I looked for him, but I was afraid to ask about him. Think his is an icon the first Americans could live without? Then why can't Cleveland's baseball fans?

(By the way, one thing I've wondered about the American Indian as icon is whether we've really come very far from the "noble savage" idea that the early European settlers came up with. How do you get to a real, unvarnished understanding of and appreciation for these people in all their remarkable richness and variety? Can we who are not they, ever?)

The night we went to the lazar light show projected on the unfinished Crazy Horse sculpture was crystal clear, and the show came off without a hitch.  Indians: one; US commanders-in-chief: zero.

Other icons I have seen these two beautiful days in South Dakota's Black Hills included Harley-Davidson motorcycles ridden and nurtured by men and women who dress that part, and the buffalo which I saw almost nose to nose in Custer State Park. Not to mention the sights and smells and sounds of the iconic pine forests that some say give this area its name.

Sadly, vast swaths of those pines are dried up and brown as the result of an infestation of insects. Our hostess expressed disdain for "tree-huggers" who prevented the Forest Service from spraying the trees before it was too late, which now it may be. I don't know the facts of that matter, but my heart is usually with the tree-huggers. Except sometimes what seems right can turn out to be just plain wrong. Icons are such slippery things.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Bad, Very Bad

If you spend a Sunday visiting the Badlands, have you celebrated a Witches' Sabbath?

Risky perhaps, but worth every minute of it. The way such things tend to be...

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Corn and Pastures

Driving from the the eastern third of Iowa to the western third of South Dakota is a long journey from green fields of corn and soybeans to rolling grazing lands. It is to move from seeing farmers wearing feed caps to seeing ranchers in cowboy hats.

Somewhere in the middle of it all is Mitchell, SD, home of the world's only (or so they claim, and who's to doubt?) Corn Palace. It's a medium-sized auditorium/basketball court/exhibition hall right smack in the center of a town of about 14,000 souls.  You've perhaps seen pictures of this "Moorish style" building topped with turrets.  What makes it unique is that each year two of its four sides are covered with pictures and decorations created out of the products of the surrounding farm land...corn, grasses, sorghum, rye, oat heads, sour dock, etc. Each year has a theme; 2013 is-was-"we celebrate"...Christmas, Easter, Memorial and Veterans' Day, to name a few that made the cut. (It was somewhat disappointing to learn that only two of the building's four sides are covered with corn, etc; but that explains why all pictures of the Corn Palace are from the same angle.)

I say the 2013 theme "was" because large sections of the walls are now bare plywood, which the birds pecking  away at the art work may have caused to happen, but also because the Mitchellites seem to start the process in the fall with the harvest. I think you have to get to Mitchell before July 13 to view the Corn Palace at its best.

It's tempting to laugh at this unique example of American folk art, and I probably won't hurry to see it again anytime soon.  But it does represent the pride a relatively small town can take in something unique to it that also happens to draw thousands of tourists each summer. I can't imagine that creating it anew each year is easy and without controversy, but the people persist when they know they have something no one else has.  A tip of the old feed cap to the good people of Mitchell SD!

Bedding down tonight in Murdo SD, pop 670-some. Stomach full of buffalo burger from the Buffalo Bar and Restaurant, consumed in the company of real, hopefully working cowboys, genuinely at home on the range.  America, here we are!

Digging Into My Roots

"When I visit my mother in Iowa she always has a project or two or more for me to do, which is fine because I am glad she can live in her own house at the age of 94 and have jobs for me to do. This time she needed some work done in her yard, and so I spent yesterday and today turning over and raking smooth a small patch of Iowa soil.

"What a joy! After 20+ years of struggling with Ohio's clay, I actually enjoyed working the soil of my childhood and youth, with which I grew up and which I largely took for granted. The midwest's dirt is perhaps the single greatest gift of nature and of nature's god to our nation. It is a rich and fertile ground out upon which we built the bulk of our nation's abundance. The coastal folks may think of us as merely "fly-over country," but this land's bounty keeps their bellies full."

Young Men and Fire

In his 74th year author Norman Maclean (River Runs Through It and Other Stories) devoted himself to researching the 1949 Mann Gulch, Montana, forest fire which claimed the lives of 13 young Smokejumpers. When Maclean died in 1990 at the age of 87 the book remained unfinished. It was later completed by colleagues and published in 1992 as Young Men and Fire.

I read the book a number of years ago, and thought of it as soon I learned of the deaths of 19 firefighters in Arizona. Much about the two events sounds eerily similar, though I neither recall nor know the details of either of them now. As I have looked through Young Men and Fire I have remembered that it went into more detail than I could absorb at the time, interspersed with Maclean’s reflections on old age as he had attained it and on what it must be like to die young.

I offer the following passage from near the end of Young Men and Fire in memory of the young whose lives were consumed by fire in Arizona:

“To project ourselves into (the firefighters’) final thoughts will require feelings about a special kind of death–the sudden death in fire of the young, elite, unfulfilled, and seemingly unconquerable. As the elite of young men, they felt more surely than most who are young that they were immortal. So if we are to feel with them, we must feel that we are set apart from the rest of the universe and safe from fires, all of which are expected to be put out by ten o’clock the morning after Smokejumpers are dropped on them. As to what they felt about sudden death, we can start by feeling what the unfulfilled always feel about it, and, since the unfulfilled are many, the Book of Common Prayer cries out for all of them and us when it begs that we all be delivered from sudden death.

“‘Good Lord, deliver us.

‘From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder; and from sudden death,

‘Good Lord, deliver us.’

“One thing is certain about their final thoughts–there was not much size to them. Time and place did not permit even superior young men dying suddenly ‘to see their whole lives pass in review,’ although books portray people preparing to die as seeing a sort of documentary movie of their lives. Everything, however, gets smaller on the way to becoming eternal. It is also probable that the final thoughts of elite young men dying suddenly were not seeing or scenic thoughts but were cries or a single cry of passion, often of self-compassion, justifiable if those who cry are justly proud. The two living survivors of the Mann Gulch fire have told me that, as they went up the last hillside, they remember thinking only, ‘My God, how could you do this to me? I cannot be allowed to die so young and so close to the top.’ They said they could remember hearing their voices saying this out loud.”

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We leave tomorrow for another road trip, this one west. If I notice or experience unusual, funny, touching, or just plain weird things I will share them with you. Not a travelogue, thank you. Check in from time to time to join us on our journey.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip East: Tuesday, June 25

Get this: the house Maria showed us first thing Tuesday morning may be the right one for Jonathan, Liz, Robin and Keira. Better than the other houses we were prepared to visit in Oneonta. Life is in its living, so just go for it.

Beautiful drive home, but longer than we'd expected, in part because we got turned around in Binghamton when I-86 east seemed not to be there as the map showed it would be. Didn't know until we were a number of miles down SR 17 and saw a sign that it is the future I-86. Apparently lack of funding interrupts designating the portion of the road between Binghamton and Elmira as an Interstate highway. I guess the locals all know that, but am not sure why they don't make it clear to passers-through. Maybe they believe life is in its living, so why should I not live a few moments of it in beautiful Binghamton?

New York State's highways and attendant facilities leave a lot to be desired compared to Ohio's, in my humble opinion. But maybe my opinion will change after more trips to and from Oneonta. I expect we will make a lot of them.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip East: Monday, June 24

On our way to Ikea (our morning's entertainment) we passed a Methodist Church with a sign out front that read something like this: "Protect yourself from sunburn with Sonblock."  We'll, maybe it didn't say exactly that, but it's how I remember it. I pondered the message for several minutes, trying to figure out what it meant Perhaps the reason I never figured it out is that I remember it wrong. That's probably as logical an explanation as any I can come up with, except maybe that, in its original state, it was as incomprehensible as I now recall it.

On to Oneonta, NY. While checking into the Rainbow Motel on Oneonta's east side, I casually mentioned to the owner, Maria, that we were in town to scout out rental houses for our other daughter and husband and family, moving to Oneonta from Spokane WA in August. Maria said they had a house they are looking to rent a couple of doors down. She also told us about an agent she knew who might help us. Good thing we tried a mom and pop motel this time. Very nice place, too. I'd stay there again. Give folks a chance and you can be pleasantly surprised. It's often worth it.

Ate dinner at The Yellow Deli, which turned out to be part of something called "Twelve Tribes," which is a sort of a world-wide Messianic restoration-of-Israel commune. Great sandwiches in a place decorated to look like the great outdoors covered with words. Did my $20 go in part to support some kind of cult? Need to check it out. (Update: did check it out, and yep, some think it’s a cult.) When I recall the place now the witch's gingerbread house in "Hansel and Gretel" comes to mind. Give folks a chance and you might want to run the other way.

How many "religions" give rising generations good reason to be wary of all religion!

Quick Notes from a Road Trip East: Sunday, June 23

Easy Sunday morning in Chestnut Hill. Earth-warming sun shone as we walked to the Night Kitchen Bakery to satisfy my need for coffee. A little later, a short walk in Fairmont Park, then salad lunch of Weaver's Way Co-op's CSA greens at home. 

In the afternoon to Philadelphia's Ice Box for the second of The Crossing's three "Month of Moderns" concerts...this one called "The Gulf...between you and me." Inspired by the BP Gulf of Mexico blowout, the works performed invited us to ponder not only the scope of the disaster itself but also its effect on one couple. Also, other kinds of chasms between human beings and between us and nature.  Major work added original art projected on huge white wall. Far out "post modern" music with one more recognizable style of piece thrown in for relief. The Crossing is a unique and extremely talented vocal ensemble doing works few other groups would dare try. We are so proud and pleased that Rebecca is part of it. 

Went out after concert with some of Rebecca and Aaron’s friends and fellow performers. There's an energy in creative folks that I feed off of when I let myself. Diversity seems the rule though I am sure there are limits to tolerance for ineptness, boringness, and conventionality.  Met artist and apparent Renaissance man Steven Bradshaw who engaged me in conversation about 2001: A Space Odyssey. When we got home Rebecca presented me with a belated Father's Day gift: a print of a graphic by Steven featuring the film's famous monolith. Well-planned creative meeting on Steve's part. 

Quick Notes from a Road Trip: Saturday, June 22

I'll never eat breakfast at a Subway again, especially at one housed in a gas station and whose workers are young people who got up far too early...after all, it was only 8:30 am. But if you must eat there (which we felt compelled to do because our motel was handing out $5.00 Subway vouchers to compensate for the closure of the restaurant they had been sending people to for a free full breakfast)...if you must, when the sullen server reaches into the refrigerator to pull out the 8-inch yellow and white disk--a discolored round of something they call an egg--try to pretend you didn't see it.  Don't watch her slap it on the flatbread. But be sure to answer "yes" when she asks if you want it toasted. Imagine eating that cold.

The One World Shop in Ephrata, PA is by far the largest such store I've ever been in. Decent Beans-and-Something wrap at their cafe. Clerk at main desk mentioned her plans to drive to Montana in a couple of weeks, and I told her we'd be doing that next month. She'd made the trip often because it's her husband's home. They sort of count Davenport IA as their jump-off point since they go to the American Pickers' store/museum just north of there. Most sought-after recommendation? Don't miss the Corn Palace. It's decided; we will stop in Mitchell, SD. But I think we will skip the Pickers' place. 

The Bird-in-Hand Farmers' Market is one more sign that the Amish aren't above making a quick buck off the "English." If you go, stay in the food section; skip the kitsch. 

Arrived at Rebecca and Aaron's around 4:30. Nice al fresco dinner at The Cafette down the street. Given lunch, I had to try the ribs. Delicious!