Completing the Circle Tour

I have returned to Minnesota after a two-day drive back from Fitchburg, Massachusetts with a stop overnight in Napoleon, Ohio. My mother told me once she always thought I would be a traveler, but while I live farther away than any of my brothers and sisters, I don't travel that much.

In fact, I still think the concept of being somewhere different for dinner than you were for lunch is pretty cool and whenever I drive across country, I think about those pioneers who said goodbye to their family and headed West. Let me tell you, if you've never driven across half-a-country, you cannot possibly appreciate the reality of their decision to leave, because there was no way they were ever going to see the friends and family they left behind again.

Fortunately, that's no longer a problem and this two-week trip has reinforced the notion of getting off the main thoroughfare. On the way back, I drove down through Southern New York, around Watkins Glen, along the Susquehana and then Allegany Rivers, over Chataqua Lake until I made tracks for Ohio.

This country, really, is unbelievable in terms of what it offers in the way of a view. The things you can see in a short period of time is mind boggling.

You can start in a place like Woodbury, Minnesota and in no time at all...

You can be in Galena Illinois...



Through the cornfields of Indiana (I wanted to stop and watch a cropduster yesterday but the corn was too high to see the horizon!)...



Outside Jacob's Field in Cleveland...



Looking out at the largest mountain in Massachusetts -- Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires... (1,300 miles from Minnesota)



As your wife plays cribbage with her mother in the vanishing twilight...



And then you're a few hundred miles north, on the Canadian border, sitting on the camp deck...




And climbing a mountain (2 hours) and an abandoned fire tower to view Vermont...



You can go from the oldest schoolhouse in Vermont...



To the house you grew up in in Massachusetts.



You can start the day in Boston...



Have lunch along a winding road in Southern upstate New York.



And in a flash you can go from the grime of Gary, Indiana...



And the stench of the huge BP oil refinery...



To an unhurried (really) drive along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago (the interstate was dead stopped, by the way)



One note here. If you're an aviation enthusiast, this particular part of the trip requires you to hold your nose at the unbridled corruption of Mayor Richard Daley, who sent the bulldozers in at midnight to destroy the perfectly lovely lakefront Meigs airport.

And pretty much home again.

I'm going to make the trip again by car soon, I think. But someday -- someday -- by "car" will be in the air and I'll be stopping at places like Burke Lakefront airport in Cleveland and Elmira Airport in New York.