May 21, 2007 -- We departed Hudson today with the hope that we'd be visiting friends in upstate New York, and Toronto, Ontario on the way to Kathy's folks in Michigan. It was not to be.
Kathy's mom took a turn for the worse (she'd been in decline for years) and died on May 22nd. The handwriting had been on the wall and we decided to skip those two friends, and we made a "bee-line" toward Grand Rapids, Michigan, over-nighting in Cleveland, Ohio where we got "the call."
This isn't the place to describe the succeeding few days; on May 29 we did stop at other friends (in Michigan) before heading west on May 30th.
As this story unfolds, we hope to split this page up into segments of the trip. For the moment, it's just the westbound journey. Meanwhile, you can see a map of the whole trip, with the portions we've completed, here.
Highlights
We took a car ferry across Lake Michigan with Kathy's niece Sara in tow. Met her Mom and husband Roger, and stayed with them (Beaver Dam, Wisconsin). Scott made us all a lovely meal and having come from particularly sad times in Michigan, found ourselves totally smashed: she on too much wine, he on too much gin. We were tea-totalers for days after that
Next stop was Sioux Falls, SD and subsequently the South Dakota Badlands. A lot of the time was rainy and cool, but given the weather extremes the area gets, it was reasonably pleasant
Mt. Rushmore : both of us had visited Mt. Rushmore in our youths. The place has changed dramatically -- the statues are as majestic as they ever were, but the Park Service has made a lovely shrine around these old rocks.
Ellsworth AFB -- this region was the home for ~500 of the US's Minuteman nuclear (George Bush: "Nuke-you-ler") missiles, decommissioned after the Cold War. We got to tour a training facility on the base, where the operators for these nukes were trained. Pretty spooky, actually.
Wind Cave, Jewel Cave -- Caves are widely diverse and for Kathy, fascinating. For Scott... less so. It is difficult to take photos in caves, either you blind your fellow tourists with your flash, or use clever techniques to get no-flash photos. In neither case do the photos look that impressive: the grandeur of caves gets lost in most photos.
Messed up the car (muffler) about 150 miles from Vancouver, ran over a piece of curb and crushed a section of exhaust. An easy fix, it could have been a lot worse.
