May all of you have a colorful and inspiring Autumn, fair readers!
On Tuesday, June 21st, I embarked upon a marvelous adventure across our beautiful country in our blue 2008 Chevy Aveo, loaded with bedding and camping gear for off-road catnaps between motel shower+bed stays. My traveling companions included a Google tablet full of audio books; a road atlas from AAA; an interstate-highway guide entitled Next Exit, that lists the amenities to be found near each off-ramp; plus a small baseball bat, a can of mace, and a key chain that screams when you pull it.
Fortunately, I had trouble with neither man nor beast on this journey. Sometimes it was too hot and muggy to sleep, but only once did the weather become a problem, when torrents of pea-sized hail fell one afternoon in New Mexico, with such density that for an hour it was impossible to see while driving. However, a spectacular sight it was, accompanied by sensational thunder and lightening! Sometimes the GPS on my tablet took me to odd places, although it saved my sanity many times on obscure country roads that lacked signage.
The first notable place that I visited was the Grand Canyon, at which I spent an inspirational afternoon. There had been some rain that day, so many of the "softer" tourists were leaving when I arrived, and I was able to spend a couple of hours on the Rim Trail without having to battle crowds. Wonderful!
Two-and-a-half days were spent in Texas, visiting the three Presidential libraries/museums there -- LBJ's and Bush 41's and 43's. The LBJ museum at UT Austin was particularly fun for me because he was president during my early childhood in the 1960s, and there were copious artifacts representing my first memories of what was on the evening news -- Kent State, Watts, Vietnam, Woodstock, etc. Bush 43's museum at Southern Methodist U. is very high-tech and interactive, much like the recent remodel of the Reagan Library. My favorite of the three is Bush 41's museum at Texas A&M, which has a very personal, home-grown feel to it, and when I visited there was a special exhibit of classic cars. The grounds near the Bush 41 museum are particularly welcoming and include a rose garden, a catch-and-release fishing pond, and a foot bridge that leads out to a peaceful gated family grave site, where their daughter, Robin, has been re-interred. One of my favorite features of the Bush 41 compound is this gorgeous sculpture of horses jumping over a piece of the Berlin Wall:
This travelogue will continue in upcoming posts, but I'd like to close this log entry with the announcement of a special project that I have begun on behalf of my family, in honor of my late mother:
The Bonnie Pryne Schaack Memorial Heritage Project
The chief aim of this project is to compile as many facts and stories about our family as possible, in order to produce electronic and printed archives for future generations of our family to explore, preserve, and append. Part of preserving our family heritage should involve maintaining sites and artifacts such as grave sites. Some of our ancestors' existing monuments are badly worn and require fresh markers. Here is the first one I wish to refresh:
This is the marker for my maternal great-grandmother's mother, Idella Butler Segondollar, who died in 1895 when she was just 23 years old, and great-grandma was only five. This grave site also contains the remains of my great-grandmother's twin brother, Henry, who died at birth in 1890. More news regarding the Heritage Project's activities will be reported on this web log, as well.
Annie
"The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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