In Key West last month, we noticed the Conch Republic flag displayed in more than a few places.
More about the not-very-serious Conch Republic micronation, created in 1982, is in this Miami Take article. Curiously, the article doesn’t describe how the flag came to be, just that it was simultaneous with the declaration of the CR, which was a kind of protest against a surprise U.S. Border Patrol roadblock on US 1 at the entrance to the Keys. Still, the design works, and it’s something distinctively Key West.
Saw the very distinctive Sicilian flag in Key West, too, just off Duval, over a joint that promised southern Italian food.
The design is not only distinctive, but ancient. This is a silver drachma from Sicily, ca. 300 BC.
I digress. During one of our Key West walkabouts, we made a point of finding the southern terminus of highway US 1, which is at the intersection of Fleming and Whitehead streets.
A business taking advantage of its unique location. Locational branding, they might say in marketing.
Now that I’ve now seen the southern terminus of US 1, that clearly means I have to see the northern terminus. That happens to be in Fort Kent, Maine, so perhaps a summertime visit. A real epic would be driving the entire 2,369 miles between Key West and Fort Kent on that highway. People drive all of the 2,448-mile Route 66, and it’s not even a real highway anymore. I’ve been gifted, or cursed, with the ability to think up more long trips that I can possibly do.
Half a block away from the beginning/end of US 1 is the Monroe County courthouse.
A nearby sign says: The original wooden courthouse was completed in 1823. The county occupied most of the Southern Florida Peninsula. The county seat in Key West currently covers the Florida Keys, and portions of the Everglades National Park. The present red brick courthouse, built in a traditional county courthouse style, was completed in 1890. It features a 100-foot tall clock tower and is an architectural feature that can be observed from almost any part of Key West.
A traditional county courthouse? In the Northeast, yes. Looks like someone used one of those building-moving transit beams in Rocky Horror to transport an entire New England courthouse down to the Keys.
The courthouse grounds comes with this oddity.
At least, odd to me.
A kapok tree, ceiba pentandra. Odd to more than just me. Enough people that the city put a sign describing kapok trees, next to this example of one. The sign’s a bit worse for wear.
Java cotton is one name for its fiber, which surely evokes distant islands.
More Key West signs.
Is this not a handsome building? And looks solid enough to stand in any mere wind.
Formerly the island’s Custom House, Post Office, Federal Courthouse and 7th District Lighthouse Offices. Built – the early 1890s – when architectural beauty wasn’t considered in conflict with the practice of republican government. These days, it’s the Key West Museum of Art & History.
Sure, the chicken has been crossing the road for a long time now, but how often did you actually see it?
Pretty often in Key West, is the answer.
I’m hard pressed to think of any other North American town with footloose chickens. As in, on the streets and sidewalks. Not out in rural areas, but even there you don’t seem to see that many. Then again, the Conch Republic is only tangentially a North American town. North Caribbean is another way to describe it.
“When people stopped the laborious process of turning live chickens into Sunday dinner many decades ago, some backyard chickens gained their freedom,” notes Florida Rambler. “Other roosters were released when cock-fighting became illegal.”
So, for this rooster, his great- great- however many great-granddaddy was a champion cock, known to betting men from here to Savannah?
They’ve gone on to a career of being local color, these birds, with forays in behaving like pests in people’s yards. They are feral, after all, living in the lushness that is Key West. Was the chicken ever considered for the Conch Republic flag? Probably not; chickens don’t get a lot of respect from people, unless they’re dinner.
Americans know their national parks – the famous ones, anyway – but how about their national preserves? A similar, yet different sort of designation by Congress. I don’t know all the details myself, but one thing is that resource extraction seems to be possible in limited ways at least some of the 21 preserves, but not at all (?) in the 63 parks. Regardless, preserves are different places on the maps, though they are often adjacent to parks.
Such as Big Cypress National Preserve, which is a large chunk of Florida next to Everglades NP.
Head south from metro Orlando on US 27 and eventually – and it takes a while – the suburban aspects peter out and give way to agriculture, especially citrus and sugarcane. At a hamlet called Palmdale, the highway Florida 29 continues the trek south, meeting both I-75 (Everglades Parkway, Alligator Alley) and US 41. By that time, agriculture has given away to (mostly) undeveloped wetlands. Swamp, in the old days, but in fact the preserve and the park don’t qualify as such. We picked US 41 and headed east, into the thick in the Big Cypress.
Daylight is short in December, even in southern Florida, so we barely had time to traverse US 41 before losing the light. But we managed a few stops.
The territory was behind fences in some spots.
Mostly not.
By dark, we’d passed out of the preserve and on to the edge of the national park. Much of US 41 – known as the Tamiami Trail in part of Florida according to various sources, but not on any signs that I saw – is under construction toward its eastern end, meaning a tight drive through concrete barricades, everyone’s least favorite kind of driving. Under reconstruction, that is, and for good reason.
“The Tamiami Trail (U.S. Highway 41) has long been recognized as one of the primary barriers to flow of water through the ecosystem,” the NPS notes. “The need to eliminate barriers to overland flow of water in the Everglades is considered one of the indisputable tenets of restoration. Much scientific information amassed in recent decades reinforces the importance of removing these barriers to water flow in order to restore natural marsh connectivity.
“In 2009, Congress authorized implementation of the plan selected in the 2008 Modified Water Deliveries to Everglades National Park, Tamiami Trail Modifications, Limited Reevaluation Report (LRR) … The LRR plan would improve potential marsh connectivity, reduce sharp changes in water velocity, and improve rainy season depths and durations. In addition, these modifications will improve the ridge and slough landscape and fish productivity, which could result in increased foraging success for wading birds.”
It makes for a temporarily unpleasant drive, but I think we can all get behind increased foraging success for wading birds and other worthwhile eco-goals for the much abused Everglades. Now only if the plan could do something about Everglades pythons.
I have to admit it, we bought gas at Buc-ee’s more than once on our trip to Florida. Turns out that the chain’s gas prices are comparable with Costco. That is, 20 to 30 cents cheaper per gallon than most standard gas stations. Costco tends to be on main thoroughfares in densely populated places, which is sometimes convenient, sometimes not. Buc-ee’s is the flip of that, tending to be on major highways at some distance from densely populated places. Sometimes convenient, sometimes not.
We gassed up at the Smiths Grove, Kentucky Buc-ee’s just off I-65 on December 5, early in our trip. We had to make a decision on how to proceed from there. One choice: continue on I-65 to Nashville, take I-40 east from there roughly to Cookeville, Tennessee, and take smaller roads into Jackson County, to reach our friends’ home in the holler. Or: take smaller roads across southern Kentucky and into Tennessee, bypassing metro Nashville and going through towns and hamlets and farmland and woods we’d never seen before, ultimately connecting to the appropriate small roads in Jackson County. It isn’t too hard to guess what we did.
Kentucky 101
It so happened that exiting from Buc-ee’s in Smiths Grove takes you to Kentucky 101, a two-lane highway that can either take you back to I-65 or south through Warren and Allen counties. Coming from the crowds of Buc-ee’s, people and cars, the contrast of heading south on Kentucky 101 is clear.
As of now, at least, Bro. Tim Meador is the Allen County Jailer, so I assume he won the most recent election.
I know that’s a county job that probably involves a fair amount of paperwork. Still, I picture the Jailer as an official who, like in a movie, puts offenders in the jug himself, turning a skeleton key (one of a few jangling on a big ring) to lock the cell.
Scottsville, Kentucky
The main traffic hub of Scottsville (pop. 4,300), the seat of Allen County, is the junction of Kentucky 101 and 98, known as Main and Court streets locally. Instead of a county courthouse, the hub is in the form of a square with businesses around it and a lot of traffic passing through. More than I would have guessed.
It was lunchtime. I can report that Thai Orchid is as good as you might find in a larger town. In our time, Thai has pretty much joined the tapestry of American cuisine as thoroughly as Chinese or Mexican food did in previous generations.
The main public library is near the square, sporting a local Wall of Fame.
The names include Lattie Moore, who sang, “I’m Not Broke but I’m Badly Bent,” a song with pretty much the same theme as Al Dexter’s “Wine, Women and Song.”
I won’t look all the names up, but the Scottsville Wall of Fame also includes Johnny Green, pioneer aviator, who did the first commercial flights between Florida and Cuba, apparently.
Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee
We drove on Kentucky 98 east to the near-border town of Gamaliel, pop. 391, still on the Kentucky side of the line. A lesser-known Biblical name, but I also can’t help thinking of the G. in Warren G. Harding.
South from there, Kentucky 63 turns into Tennessee 56 after a few miles. There’s no sign marking the border, just one announcing the Tennessee highway number. Pretty casual for a line that might have been an international border, had the secessionists had their way (unless, of course, Kentucky left the old US).
Besides a cool name, Red Boiling Springs (pop. 1,205), Tennessee, has a history. As the name suggests, people took the waters there.
“As recently as 1920, Red Boiling Springs had about a dozen places in which visitors could stay,” The Tennessee Magazinereported a few years ago. “The largest was the Palace Hotel, which had 180 rooms. Over the next several generations, business declined… and… a 1969 flood destroyed large parts of the town. However, three of the Red Boiling Springs resort hotels are still open. They were in (nearly) continuous operation throughout the 20th century and still reflect more of the lifestyle of the late 19th century than they do the 21st.”
Make that two hotels. One of those mentioned in the article, the Donoho, burned down in November.
The gray, chilly day somehow fit the scene of a wrecked historic hotel.
Damned shame. I can’t leave it at that. Soon after passing through Red Boiling Springs, we arrived at our destination in eastern Middle Tennessee. The next day, we enjoyed a Tennessee hootenanny.
Our hosts, Dave and Margaret, on guitar and drums.
Decorating for Christmas this year meant a rapid set-up. We spent a fair number of hours on the 23rd making the living room ready for a tree – moving clutter, mostly. On Christmas Eve, I brought the tree in from the garage, and Ann mostly decorated it. Finishing touches, by me, were in progress even on the morning of Christmas Day, but since that moment in the life of our family doesn’t involve an early-morning rush downstairs by children anticipating Santa’s bounty any more, that was doable.
Ann did a fine job of decorating, in the style of our family: fill up the tree with a wide variety of glowing and glinting objects accumulated across the decades.
We got a late start on decorating for Christmas, though when I think about, decorating after the Solstice discourages the sort of front-loading of Christmas that a lot of people complain about, but which they do anyway.
We had a good reason for the late start: a drive to Florida and back, beginning on December 4 and ending on the 22nd. Not just to Florida, but as far as you can go in that state, at least by car, namely to Key West and back. Early to mid-December seemed like a good time to do such a thing, after any traveling people do for Thanksgiving but before the worst of the Christmas-New Year’s rush. A short shoulder season in other words, but a good one, with room rates not quite subject to surge pricing, and crowds thick in some high-volume tourist destinations, but not impossible.
Also, Florida has few mosquitoes this time of year. Not no mosquitoes, as we found out one day in the southern reaches of the peninsula, just a “bearable” number.
Sometime earlier this year, I got the idea that I wanted to take four long drives after turning 64. Four for 64, you could say. Doing so by the end of 2025 wasn’t part of the idea, but that’s how things worked out. The drive to Florida and back, by way of such places as Indianapolis, Louisville, Chattanooga and Atlanta, totaled 3,682 miles. For all four trips since June, the total is about 14,300 miles.
That could be made to sound impressive, but in fact American men my age average more than that every year, about 15,000 miles, at least according to this source, which cites US DOT data. Younger men drive even more annually. Most of that is commuting, however. My commuting mileage by car has been exactly zero this year, and while I drive locally to stores and such, it couldn’t be more than a few thousand miles. So it seems clear that, as an American man, it was my duty to get out and drive.
When we headed south in early December, snow covered the ground all the way past Indianapolis, where we stopped for a few hours at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is part of a larger campus called Newfields – and better examined in summer, I think. But the museum is a good one, with a solid collection, especially 19th-century American and European works. Such as “Justitia,” a Morris & Co. work from the 1890s.
After overnighting south of Louisville, we diverted from I-65 and took smaller roads through southern Kentucky and into Tennessee to a holler in Jackson County, where we were the guests of dear friends. Tennessee musicians from those parts — some professional, others skilled amateurs — gathered on the the evening of Saturday the 6th, for one of the periodic jams in our friends’ barn, which houses no animals these days, but a small stage and some sound equipment and a fair number of folding chairs. A joyful jam it was. Food was potluck. I like to think we went to a hootenanny.
The road through the holler. By this point, no snow. We were trading cold for warmth. That was one of the goals of the trip. Maybe the main one.
From there it was mostly a straight shot down through Georgia on I-75 to Florida, and eventually US 27 to Orlando by way of non-coastal Florida places like Gainesville, Ocala and Lady Lake, a string of settlement less agricultural and less pastoral now than ever, more like an endless outer suburb. Heavy traffic is an invasive species in this part of Florida, surely as pythons are in damper parts of the state. Not just masses of cars and trucks, either, but also golf carts. We passed close enough to The Villages to see billboards advertising legal representation in the event of golf cart accidents. Carts, I’ve heard, provide transport in great numbers in that sprawl of a settlement.
The drive to and in Florida involved the usual North American mix of large and small roads, smooth and ragged, grid-like and irregular, though Florida cities tended toward the irregular (except for Key West), and as crowded as can be and as empty as can be. Snow lined the way up north, thinning out the further south we went, giving way to brown landscapes and bare trees. Then we came into greenery – evergreens and palms and even deciduous species turning color. We crossed mighty bridges over mighty rivers, small culverts over alligator haunts, and the string of bridges that make up the civil engineering marvel known as the Overseas Highway (US 1). We crossed barely acknowledged borders and signs at the Florida visitor center on I-75 proclaiming The Free State of Florida.
Florida Man was out and about, weaving in and out of high-speed traffic, pushing 100 and pretty sure that physics doesn’t apply to him, though I have to admit that Florida isn’t different from any other state in that way. Traffic stopped cold more than once: for a banged up, upside-down SUV; for a raging RV fire, attended by a half-dozen firemen; for a serious two- or maybe three-car wreck on the other side of a divided highway; for construction, usually without any workers in sight; and once for no reason that we could tell at all.
In Orlando, we spent all December 9 at Universal Epic Universe, a theme park that only opened in May. Ann flew in the day before we went to the park and flew home the day afterward, taking advantage of the low prices that discount airlines offer to high-volume places in a shoulder season, if you take no bags and buy nothing to eat or drink at sky-high prices, literally and figuratively. A small bag of hers had been stowed in our car for the visit.
A theme park is one thing, but I wanted a look at Orlando, at least a sliver of it, the next day. Ann’s flight was fairly late that day, so we were able to spend part of it in posh Winter Park, including a tour boat ride through the town’s small lakes, lush with greenery and expensive houses on their banks, and connected by canals.
A drive that included the stretch of US 41 that passes through the Everglades took us to Homestead, Florida, and the mid-century charms of The Floridian motel. A day in Everglades NP followed, including an airboat tour and a drive to the coast at Florida Bay. The next day, before leaving Homestead for a drive in the rain across the Overseas Highway to Key West and while the sun still shined, we toured the Coral Castle, a one-man construction project using 1,000 tons of oolite to make walls, carvings, stone furniture, and a castle tower.
Key West was a two-day, three-night mid-December ramble on the busy and less busy streets of Old Town, including humans but also chickens, taking in the likes of the Hemingway House, the Little White House, Mallory Square, the San Carlos Institute, the Key West Aquarium, and the Key West Cemetery. Also, tourist shops, boutiques and the building where Pan-Am was founded. We ate and drank, though as our wont, nothing alcoholic. Key West was decked out for the holidays but not over the top. We walked and walked some more. It felt like a couple of pleasant summer days.
From my 2014 visit, I knew that on the back streets near the little-visited cemetery, parking was possible on an otherwise cramped island. So it was. On Margaret Street, within sight of the cemetery.
The return drive took us up the eastern coast of Florida, but avoiding the worst traffic in Miami-Dade by taking Florida’s Turnpike. By December 17, we’d arrived in Orange Park, a large suburb of Jacksonville, for a stay with two other dear friends, former Austinites now in northern Florida. Part of the next day was in and near downtown Jacksonville, one of the larger U.S. cities I’d never visited before (I believe San Jose is now the largest on that list). During our downtown stroll, we encountered the coolest building in Jacksonville and certainly one of the coolest in Florida.
We quit Florida on the 19th, but weren’t quite done with the trip. Yuriko had never been to Atlanta and wanted to go. Though I’d been however many times since 1982, I was happy to oblige, so we spent two nights and a day there, using the day to see the astonishing Georgia Aquarium and the impressive but somewhat overpriced World of Coca-Cola.
The last legs of the trip were long drives: Atlanta to Elizabethtown, Kentucky; and from there to home the next day. I wasn’t about to let them be completely dull drives, so we stopped on the second-to-last day in Chattanooga, to see the conveniently located, blocks-from-the-highway Chattanooga Choo-Choo redevelopment. On the last day of the trip, we stopped in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and walked across the Big Four Bridge, a former RR bridge across the wide Ohio, now serving pedestrians and bicyclists.
Home and then — Christmas, when things slow down for a week or so. Good timing.
That was the goal about two months ago now, after I left Colorado Springs for a solo drive back to Illinois. The fastest way would be to link with I-70 while still in Colorado. I wasn’t inclined to do that, though I did take that Interstate route through much of Kansas. Instead, I wanted to start remote and stay that way for the length of eastern Colorado.
So east on Colorado 94 it was, which passes through such hamlets as Yoder, Rush and Punkin Center. Mostly, though, there are few signs of people.
I noticed the Front Range growing smaller in my rearview mirror. I wondered at what point they would vanish from sight, and decided to keep track of their shrink, and note the last time I could see them. Naturally, I forgot about that resolve, and next thing I knew, the road backward and forward stretched to both horizons.
This is looking back west, a mountain barely visible, and is also an image illustrating that the eastern Colorado terrain isn’t completely flat.
Eastbound Colorado 94 ends near Aroya, where it meets US 40/287. I took that road southeast to Kit Carson (pop. 255).
The railroad still comes through Kit Carson. It’s safe to say that without the railroad, the town might be no larger than Punkin Center. The Kit Carson Railroad Depot is now a museum.
Closed. Till Decoration Day. Really?
In any case, it was closed on September 22.
Across the street, metal works. The pump jack is one thing, but the other is a — tower?
The town of Kit Carson had two locations. The original site was located near the site where Kit Carson traded with the Arapahoe and Cheyenne Indians. The present site was determined by the arrival of the railroad. Destroyed by fire three times, twice by the torches of Indians and once by carousing cowboys, the determined citizens of the town showed their desire to survive by rebuilding.
I can’t help but think those carousing cowboys were actually a gang of rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.
Also of note, according to the town: The railroad brought in foreign dignitaries, such as the Grand Duke Alexis [Alexei Alexandrovich] of Russia. The Grand Duke hunted in Kit Carson and was accompanied by his military escort, General George Armstrong Custer on January 20, 1872. [Custer was a lieutenant colonel at the time, but never mind.]
Grand Duke Alexis was on his 1871-72 tour of America. Sounds like he had a fine old time. Could have been the subject of an episode of Death Valley Days, but I don’t think it was. Dom Pedro, emperor of Brazil, made an appearance, as did the Emperor Norton, but I digress.
From Kit Carson, I headed south to Eads, still in Colorado, and then east on Colorado 96. I had the idea that I wanted to see the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, which isn’t too far from that road. Just before the turnoff to the historic site, I noticed something odd near the highway.
A wrecked train. A long wrecked train. The cars toward to back.
Toward the front.
Nary a clue as to how it happened, or when, except that the cars don’t seem rusted or overgrown. I stayed on the road to take my pictures. The cars are lined up as if they were dumped off the track on purpose. No. Why? Or could it have been some odd accident in which the train essentially fell off in place? Or is that how derailments work? Why are front cars especially mangled?
It didn’t take too much research (later) to find some answers. The Kiowa County Independentreported in August: The heavily laden train was navigating a significant curve and elevation change west of Chivington when 16 covered hopper cars derailed. Each was filled with thousands of bushels of wheat, spilling tons of grain onto the ground along Highway 96, which runs parallel to the rail line.
Oops. Guess everyone would have heard about it if the cargo had been more volatile or toxic.
At the turnoff to the historic site, I got a view of the tracks (again, from the road). Far enough away that the mangled train cars aren’t visible.
On to the historic site, via an unpaved road.
Turns out the historic site closes at 4 pm. I got there just as the rangers were leaving, and one of them, who had a remarkable collection of snaggled and bent teeth, told me so politely. I didn’t argue with him, but I also wondered why a site so remote closes at all, except maybe for the visitors center or small museum. Rules is rules, I guess.
That was pretty much it for Colorado. I got to the border with Kansas not long after, and looked back.
Metro Denver is enormous, much larger than I remembered, even as recently as 2017. Or so it seemed. To the south, Colorado Springs is fairly large, but some orders of magnitude less than the monster metro to its north. Further south, Pueblo doesn’t seem that big, but even so it has 111,000 residents, give or take.
Then you come to Walsenburg. Who has heard of Walsenburg, Colorado (pop. 3,035), even though it too is on I-25 and on the irregular line where prairie and mountains meet? Colorado’s brisk growth over the last few decades seem to have passed it by. Its peak population was in 1940, when more than 5,800 people lived there.
I wish I could say I’d formed an impression of Walsenburg, but we stopped only for gas, and to get off the Interstate.
US 160, Walsenburg to Alamosa
Walsenburg has few people, and when you go west on US 160, that dwindles to practically none. The road crosses the Culebra Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at North La Veta Pass, elevation 9,413 feet, into the San Luis Valley. I enjoyed writing that sentence almost a much as I enjoyed the drive itself.
Enjoyable at least until dark. Wish we’d gotten to see more of it. We’d futzed around in Colorado Springs much of that day, September 13, including a fine lunch at Edelweiss German Restaurant. So the sun went down before we got to our destination, Alamosa. But we did stop for a few minutes on US 160 before we lost the light. A chilly wind blew clouds along at quite a speed, and for their part the clouds were catching the sunset in luminous patches. Until I can see the aurora, that will more than do.
Wolf Creek Pass, Way Up on the Great Divide
Follow US 160 west from Alamosa and eventually you’ll get to Four Corners. We didn’t go that far on the 15th, just to Durango. The road passes through much of the San Luis Valley, which is wide – the largest alpine valley in the world, they say – so the way is flat until you reach South Fork, Colorado. Then you climb into the San Juan Mountains, until you reach Wolf Creek Pass. Way up on the Great Divide.
Yuriko had been driving on the ascent to Wolf Creek Pass. Usually she doesn’t care for mountain roads, but she focused on a wide-load vehicle ahead of us, and we followed it up, though not at too close a distance. She thought better of driving down the other side, even though she’s never heard it immortalized by C.W. McCall.
So I drove down. Truth be told, it’s not that bad on a clear day. In our time, US 160 down from Wolf Creek Pass is four lanes, and while curvy, only the hairpin turn – which you are well warned about – is a little tricky. Not that bad in a car, anyway. I couldn’t say about taking a truck down. I’ll bet 50 years ago the route was probably still two lanes and maybe even more winding, so C.W. was only exaggerating for comic effect, not making everything up.
At the end of the drop is Pagosa Springs, whose main street was completely torn up with construction. We found lunch off the main drag at PS FroYo, which is one of those restaurants that makes money for a local charity, in this case Aspen House. We didn’t know that before we ate our sandwiches, just that it was near where we parked and not fast food. A nice bonus to find out.
Lewis Street wasn’t under construction, so that made for a pleasant stroll after lunch, including time at a resale shop. No post cards. Bought some nearly new jeans, which proved their $5 worth (and much more) when I was later deposited briefly in the Kansas mud. They were standing by at that moment, sitting in a bag on top of everything else in the back seat — blankets, sleeping bag, small bags with some winter wear. I didn’t have to dig around looking for them. That never happens, or so it seems, so I thought I’d remember when it did by noting it here.
There is a road up to Colorado’s Chimney Rock, a ridge-top archaeological site that is the nucleus of the national monument, but it was closed. The small museum at the base of the rock was still open, so along with our view, we took in a little about the Ancestral Puebloans who used to live there.
Chimney Rock and Companion Rock, foci of the national monument.
“Chimney Rock covers seven square miles and preserves 200 ancient homes and ceremonial buildings, some of which have been excavated for viewing and exploration: a Great Kiva, a Pit House, a Multi-Family Dwelling, and a Chacoan-style Great House Pueblo,” says the Chimney Rock Interpretive Association. “Chimney Rock is the highest in elevation of all the Chacoan sites, at about 7,000 feet above sea level.”
US 550 North from Durango
North from Durango on US 550, the scenery starts pretty soon.
A few miles out of town, Honeyville. It looked like a good place for souvenirs.
It was. I’m still working on a Honeyville jar of whipped cinnamon honey, which makes a warm biscuit sing.
All sorts of honey products are available.
You can watch part of the process.
A warp drive engine fueled by honey? Could be that Zefram Cochrane kept (will keep) bees.
Only a few miles north, just off US 550, is Pinkerton Hot Springs, which is the kind of place that winds up on Atlas Obscura lists (actually, so does Honeyville). We took a look, but not a dip.
Before you get to Silverton on US 550, you cross Molas Pass, which has some terrific views of the edge of the Weminuche Wilderness. The day, by this time September 18, was clear and not exactly warm, but not that cold yet. Good day for a mountain drive.
Like the highway, the Molas Pass viewpoint was busy, but not overcrowded.
The route from Silverton to Ouray is known as the Million Dollar Highway. There isn’t a consensus about why that might be.
“There are a variety of explanations regarding the source of the name for the ‘Million Dollar Highway,’ says Roadtrip America. “One version claims it is based on the value of the ore-bearing fill that was used to construct the road, and another says it refers to the high cost of building a road over Red Mountain Pass (11,008 feet) and the Uncompahgre Gorge. One thing no one will dispute is the million-dollar views around every turn. This marvel of engineering, designed by Russian immigrant Otto Mears, slices through rugged mountains as it follows old stagecoach routes and former pack trails.”
If you want some twisty mountain road action, Million Dollar’s got it. Also, stretches without guard rails.
“About 40 accidents take place on the Million Dollar Highway each year, with an average of seven deaths per year,” the Durango Herald reported in 2023. “Most of the accidents are caused by careless or fast driving in bad road conditions. Other factors are mudslides, inclement weather and wildlife appearing on the road when there is nowhere to swerve.
“While avalanches used to be a factor, the last reported death on the road because of an avalanche came in 1992.”
The views are exceptional, both as you move and when you stop. The road near Ouray.
Views near Ouray.
Ouray’s got some handsome buildings.
The main street in Ouray is the kind of place that has benches made from skis. Not the only time I saw that in Colorado.
Also, some boutique retail. Good to see that Grateful Goo is available.
Who sells that again? Gwyneth Paltrow? Anyway, hipsters, or more likely plastic surgeons and orthodontists and tech millionaires, seem to have long ago discovered Ouray, close as it is to Telluride. I saw a bumper sticker-like posting on a light pole in town that said: What do you mean there’s an employee housing crisis in Ouray? My 2nd home is always empty.
Monarch Pass
On our return to Denver, we headed out of Montrose east on US 50, a route that edges the gorgeous Blue Mesa Reservoir, and on to Gunnison and Salida. Just west of Salida, we took US 285 north, which goes to greater Denver. That highway crosses the Great Divide at Monarch Pass, elevation 11,312 feet.
Even as early as September 20, the trees were ablaze.
I suppose that isn’t early for that elevation. We saw trees turning a week earlier, further north at Rocky Mountain NP. I didn’t know it at that time, but we were just beginning a fall season during which we’d see more colors (probably) than any other year. It’s not quite over even yet, with some reds and yellows here in the neighborhood. That isn’t so unusual. Lots of people seek out fall foliage. The odd thing was that it was completely unplanned.
Which of these two destinations aren’t like the others?
That’s a beginner’s-level question. Better question: where can you find this pole, with mileages and – what units measure the distance to Heaven or Hell? – other signs?
Answer: Cairo, Nebraska.
Maybe a palm tree was in the works, but the city decided not to spend any more money. Cairo (pop. 822) is one of the small chain of small towns on the eastern section of the highway Nebraska 2, which runs westward and north of Grand Island. Cairo is the first place I stopped on my way west on that highway in early September.
Eventually the highway reaches the Nebraska National Forestand Grassland, a patch of (partly) wooded land that inspires the question, there’s a national forest in Nebraska?
West from the forest, Nebraska 2 crosses the Sandhills, an unusual place here in North America, with the land morphing from cropland to ranch land on sandy steppes. The towns on the way are mere hamlets, and sometimes not even that. On the western edge of the Sandhills, one comes to the sizable town of Alliance, Nebraska, home of Carhenge and railroad staging area for coal trains headed east.
Before I did the drive, I was looking forward to it as much as any of the roads in Colorado. It lived up to expectations. Nice when that happens.
The Fence Postcites Charles Kuralt’s fondness for Nebraska 2: “Highway 2 is not just another highway that goes somewhere. Highway 2 is somewhere,” he’s known to have said. I’d say whatever else his failings, Kuralt had good taste in roads.
Just outside Broken Bow (pop. 3,491), seat of Custer County and pretty much the only town of any size in that county, the Sandhills Journey Scenic Byway Visitor Center offers a building with bathrooms and pamphlets and displays and, for my visit at least, a grandmotherly and talkative volunteer. Old enough, she said, to remember when the highway was just a road through the countryside that attracted no attention from the outside world. Not a scenic byway, and sand hill cranes were just flocking birds. Now a trickle of tourists and bikers and RVers come this way. She had some solid recommendations, especially a good diner for lunch.
The visitor center grounds include a relocated (or was that reconstructed?) Sandhills cabin. The residences of the farmers trying to scratch out a living in the Sandhills, and finding out that no amount of scratching would make decent crops grow consistently from the land.
The Custer County Courthouse. Saturday, closed.
A block from the courthouse, some buildings around City Square Park.
City Square Park is a generic sort of name. Wonder whether there’s anyone from the town who can be honored by renaming the park? Looking at list of notables from Broken Bow, one instantly stands out.
Wiki: “Solomon D. Butcher (January 24, 1856 – March 18, 1927) was an itinerant photographer who spent most of his life in central Nebraska, in the Great Plains region of the United States… he began in 1886 to produce a photographic record of the history of European settlement in the region. Over 3,000 of his negatives survive; more than 1,000 of these depict sod houses.”
Frederic Schreyer and family, Custer County, 1880s, by Solomon Butcher.
Definitely name the park after Butcher, Broken Bow.
One more in that town. I couldn’t be bothered to get out of the car.
West of Broken Bow is Anselmo (pop. 145), home of this church, St. Anselms Catholic Church, nicknamed Cathedral of the Sandhills. Saturday, closed.
A more common sort of building, not far from the church.
Not the most imposing that I saw, but representative of the many structures like it. The grist of a photo collection. Of course it has been done. I’m pretty sure I saw a room of Bernd Becher’s photos of water towers at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Nebraska National Forest and Grassland is in an unexpected place, slap in the middle of Nebraska, not due to a freak of nature, but the efforts of human beings. Specifically, mass plantings of trees by the federal government for more than 100 years, beginning (not a surprise) during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt.
Near the national forest entrance is the Middle Loup River, broad but shallow, and crossable on a foot bridge.
I camped in the national forest. The campgrounds weren’t completely full, but there were more people than I expected for a remote spot in Nebraska. Then again, it was a Saturday night, and soon enough I figured out what brought most of them: the ATV trails. Not long after dawn on Sunday, the campers across from me – a man and a small knot of teenage boys – roared away in a small caravan of ATVs crusted with dust from the day before.
I packed up and sought out a quieter place. A national forest hill with a fire tower and some views. The tower was closed.
But the views were still pretty good.
West from the national forest, Nebraska 2 heads into the rolling grassland of the Sandhills proper. In the village of Thedford (pop. 208), varied public interpretations of the Sandhills are available for reading.
The terrain along the highway Nebraska 2 might seem monotonous to some. Too bad for them. You’re driving across a kind of ocean, terrain all wavy, except that it’s solid ground, marked by occasional trees or manmade structures, and side roads — trails — wandering deeper into the hills.
The handful of towns are really just wide places in the road. Sometimes, not even that.
Nebraska 2 parallels the BNSF line, which came first.
Note: I was standing on a public side road to take that picture, as I do with all my RR shots.
Eventually, I took the road to Alliance. But that was merely incidental. Out this far, the road, as Kuralt said, is the destination.
Our first winterish weather blew through early this week, but we’re back to cool days. For now. Some leaves seem to be clinging a little longer than usual, but most are accumulating on the ground, as expected for November. A scattering of Christmas decorations are already up, and I don’t mean in stores, where they’ve been for weeks. Let November be November, I say.
Much of my return from the East Coast generally followed the westward course set by the National Road, though I didn’t use much of US 40, which has that nickname. If you want to make decent time, you take I-68 through Maryland and then I-70 across Ohio and into Indiana, which pretty much parallels the National Road.
The Interstate is designed for just that kind of efficient travel. On the whole, it delivers. The four-lane highways also deliver boring drives, to hear some tell it. That’s an erroneous assumption, to hear me tell it. The Interstate has its fine stretches, such as I-68 in October, a gloriously colorful drive. Winding and hilly, too, through Maryland’s peculiar panhandle.
A rest stop near Hancock, Maryland, offers views to the north, so most of what you see is Pennsylvania.
The rest stop is at Sideling Hill, an enormous rise gouged by an enormous cut for I-68 to go through. An impressive feat of engineering, completed only in the 1980s. Then again, blowing up mountains is a thing that happens in this part of the country.
The narrowest part of the Maryland isn’t far away. At its narrowest, there is less than two miles are between the Potomac and the Mason-Dixon Line. So if you picked up Maryland by the panhandle, it would surely break at that narrowest point.
I filled my gas tank off the highway in the last town in Maryland, Friendsville (pop. 438), at a station whose enclosed retail space (between a few pumps) seemed little bigger than a walk-in closet, and yet there was a clerk manning the place on Saturday just before dark. Rotund and massively bearded, he was playing a video game when I opened the door to pre-pay. He might have been a little surprised to encounter a customer, at least one who didn’t pay at the pump.
From there, I continued into West Virginia, then took I-79 north into Pennsylvania, then headed west on I-70, which crosses West Virginia’s odd panhandle – more like a periscope – before reaching Ohio. After overnighting in Cambridge, Ohio, I bypassed Columbus but stopped in Springfield, near Dayton but with a distinct geographic identity. Alcor to Dayton’s Mizar, you might say.
Downtown Springfield was practically devoid of pedestrians that Sunday, and not that many cars drove through either. A few buildings rise high enough to suggest a more prosperous past, but look too closely and some of them seem to be as empty as the streets, or at least underutilized.
The National Road went, and still goes through Springfield, in the form of US 40. A milestone in Springfield marks the point at which the federal government quit paying for further westward expansion of the road. Anything else would be on the states, namely Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
Later, after the National Road had become History, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a series of statues along the route, and others to the west: “Madonna of the Trail.”
There are 12, with the easternmost of them along the National Road. Erected in the late 1920s, the Springfield one was renovated about 20 years ago.
Nearby, passersby are urged to Dream Big.
About an hour west of Springfield, at the border of Ohio and Indiana on I-70 – just barely inside Indiana – is the Uranus Fudge Factory. I had to stop for that.
Sure, there’s fudge in there somewhere, but also a lot of gags involving the word Uranus(Your-anus). Examples can be found in the newspaper — an honest-to-God paper newspaper — that the store produces, The Uranus Examiner, and gives away. I have a copy. My kind of souvenir.
Sample front-page headlines from the Summer 2025 edition:
Breaking News: You Can Explore Uranus In Three Locations
Eating Their Way Through Uranus
Get A Lick Of Uranus
Sink Your Balls In Our Putt Holes
The second of those stories was about the 2nd Annual Eating Uranus Fudge Galactic Championship held at the Anderson, Indiana location in March. Apparently it was a Major League Eating-sanctioned event, and apparently MLE is a real thing. One Patrick Bertoletti won the 2nd championship at Uranus, putting away a bit more than nine pounds of fudge in about as many minutes.
Fudge is one thing, but mostly Uranus sells stuff. A lot of stuff.
The Richmond, Indiana location is the third of three for Uranus, and I think the only one with dinosaurs —
— and a 100-foot cross of corrugated steel over a metal frame.
Until about 10 years ago, the property belonged to New Creations Chapel, which also included a church building, boarding school for troubled teens and a Bible college. The ministry, for reasons its web site explains in some detail, sold the property to Uranus, including the cross.
Heading through Richmond, Indiana, I stopped at an entrance to a large park to check my map. Glen Miller Park. A colorful spot in October.
Not named after the bandleader, which would be Glenn Miller Park. “Glen Miller Park was established in 1885 and was named for Colonel John Ford Miller, who was a railroad executive during the late 1860s,” the city of Richmond says. “Colonel Miller bought the land from Nathaniel Hawkins in 1880, with the intention of transforming the land into a park.”
So Glen Miller as in glen, a term that evokes pleasant Scottish valleys. I was just about to be on my way when I noticed a statue.
It was another of the 12 Madonna of the Trail statues, located at the edge of the park, where it meets US 40. Unlike the earlier one in Springfield, I hadn’t sought it out. It was just there. One’s travels, like life, can be strange sometimes.
Coincidence or synchronicity? In September, as I was leaving Colorado Springs, I noticed an equestrian statue near a major street: William Jackson Palmer, railroad developer and Union Army officer. Stopped at a traffic light, I had a little time to look at the statue. Soon I forgot about it.
Palmer had one of those remarkable 19th-century careers, not only as a railroad man and military officer, but also a town planner, hotelier, publisher and philanthropist. He founded the towns of Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, and Durango, among others. Though he grew up near Philadelphia, he was born on a farm near Leipsic, Delaware. Barely a month after I’d spent time in some of the towns that Palmer founded, I found myself in Leipsic, Delaware.
I still wouldn’t have make the connection if I hadn’t looked up Leipsic on Wiki. I noted that the entire list of notable people from that town had exactly one name: William Jackson Palmer. Leipsic has never been a very big place, and certainly isn’t now. I looked him up, and when I saw the picture of the statue, I remembered seeing it.
I’m going with coincidence. I have a fairly high bar when it comes to synchronicity, especially since I don’t really understand the concept. Does anyone?
Before I left Delaware last month – and believe me, it doesn’t take long to leave Delaware – I drove a section of Delaware 9, a two-lane, north-south highway that parallels the coast of Delaware Bay, running east of places like Dover, Smyrna and Odessa. An intriguing squiggle on the map, made more intriguing by the fact that part of it is also known as the Delaware Bayshore Byway, which is a National Scenic Byway. Experience has taught me that those kinds of designations are usually accorded for good reasons.
After the traffic-jammed day before, I thoroughly enjoyed the nearly empty Delaware 9.
One of the few towns along Delaware 9 is Leipsic, pop. 178. I might not have stopped but for the cemetery, one so obscure that Google Maps doesn’t have a name for it, and I didn’t see evidence of a name on the ground either.
Leipsic Cemetery, perhaps. Whatever the name, it has clearly been a burial ground for a long time.
With the sort of heartbreakers you find in cemeteries of this vintage.
Three children, same family, buried in the same decade in the 19th century.
The road passes mostly through farmland, though woods and the western edge of Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge also mark its course. Delaware’s main crops are corn and soybeans, and I’m pretty sure I was in time to see the soybean leaves changing their color. Quite a sight.
You’d think I’d have seen that in Illinois or Indiana or any of the other states chock-a-block with soybeans, but I wasn’t sure I had. Driving on a two-lane road, you’re practically driving through the color, as opposed to the distance of a four-lane highway.
Corn and soy may be the main plant crops in Delaware, but the main livestock is chickens. Some 276,700,000 head of chickens were raised in Delaware in 2024, according to the USDA. That’s an impressive number, considering how small Delaware is: almost the same number as in much larger states such as Tennessee, Kentucky or Missouri. I’m not going to crunch the numbers (I have a life to live), but I’ll bet per square unit of territory, Delaware is the nation’s chicken champ.
The Avalon Project, run by Yale Law School, has a remarkable trove of “documents in law, history and diplomacy,” as the site says. If you’re looking for a translation of the Code of Hammurabi or the Athenian Constitution, there are links. You can also find the annotated text of Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the many founding documents of the United States, just to mention some of the more famous ones.
Also within the Avalon Project is the text of the Ratification of the U.S. Constitution by the State of Delaware, December 7, 1787. To wit:
We the Deputies of the People of the Delaware State, in Convention met, having taken into our serious consideration the Federal Constitution proposed and agreed upon by the Deputies of the United States in a General Convention held at the City of Philadelphia on the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven, Have approved, assented to, ratified, and confirmed, and by these Presents, Do, in virtue of the Power and Authority to us given for that purpose, for and in behalf of ourselves and our Constituents, fully, freely, and entirely approve of, assent to, ratify, and confirm the said Constitution.
Delaware ratified before any other state, and so claims “First State” as its nickname. I have my own private nickname for Delaware. At least I do now, since waking up on the morning of October 25 in my rented room in Dover: “Last State.” As in, the 50th state I’ve spent the night in. That isn’t an achievement of any kind, just a reflection of the fact that I’ve been fortunate enough to have the time and resources necessary to go that many places. Also, that I’m eccentric enough to keep track.
After dallying in Concord on the 23rd, and spending some time in Attleboro, Massachusetts, I arrived in East Providence, Rhode Island for the night. The point of that stop was entirely to spend the night in Rhode Island, since I’d never done that either. So RI was number 49. My hotel was just barely in that state.
I noticed the Honey Dew Donuts even closer to the border. I’d seen other locations driving in. The breakfast at my “3-star” hotel was meager, so I went to Honey Dew for a second breakfast. I wish I could say I’d discovered a great regional doughnut shop along the lines of Tim Horton’s, but it was only OK. Maybe I’ll give the brand another chance sometime.
Since I’d wanted to go from eastern Massachusetts to central Delaware, I should have broken that day’s journey somewhere in New Jersey. But that wouldn’t have involved stopping for the night in Rhode Island, which had been a short stop back in the summer of ’91 – a few hours to look around Providence, and especially the capitol – and the destination of a day trip in ’95, to Newport.
As for Delaware, my entire previous experience with the state was the Wilmington interstate bus station, a break in a bus ride from Washington DC to Boston, which was a leg of the Great Bus Loop of 1982. I’m not even sure I got off the bus, though I usually did when it stopped for long enough.
Getting to Delaware last month involved an aggravating day’s drive, mostly on I-95, spending a lot of time in traffic jams. Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, bah: more than grains of sand on a beach or stars in the sky.
Even so, there were a few worthwhile moments. I finally got to see (from the turnpike) the enormous American Dream mall, adjacent to the Meadowlands Sports Complex. Reportedly now second largest in the nation, after only the Mall of America. I’d been reading about American Dream for years, since “chronic delays” always figured in real estate reporting on the project, but now it’s more or less complete. (If the developers had asked me, they’d have kept the much cooler earlier name: Meadowlands Xanadu.)
At the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the NJ Turnpike, I parked in the very large parking lot and headed for the very large building and its very large men’s room. As I walked along, a small group of Hasidim went around me, not running but at a brisk pace, headed the same direction. By the time I got to the bathroom, they were almost done with their business, and off they went. Nothing unusual about seeing Hasidim, certainly not in New Jersey, but I have to note that October 24 was a Friday, and it was mid-afternoon. So they were racing the clock. Or, more accurately, the sun.
A digression: service areas on the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway are named for famed New Jerseyans. A list is here. I suppose it’s fine that musicians such as Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, Jon Bon Jovi and Celia Cruz are honored, but where’s Bruce Springsteen? It isn’t a matter of posthumous naming, since Bon Jovi is still alive – as is Bruce Willis, who also gets an area, and Connie Chung, who does as well, though she isn’t actually from New Jersey. The ways of the NJ Turnpike Authority are mysterious.
I arrived in Dover late on the October 24. The next morning, a Saturday, I left fairly early. First stop: the Delaware State House. It was closed for the weekend. My reaction: what kind of Mickey Mouse operation is this? I got a good look at the exterior, at least.
A fairly new sculpture, in front of the capitol: The Delaware Continentals.
The plaque is long on functionaries’ names, short on information about the Delaware Continentals. An historic plaque up in Wilmington says of them:
Commanded by Colonel John Haslet, the Delaware Regiment consisted of more than 500 battle-ready troops when they marched northward to join the Continental Army in August 1776. After expiration of enlistments and Haslet’s death, the Regiment was reorganized in the winter of 1776-77 under the leadership of Colonel David Hall. Participants in many of the major battles of the Revolution, their conduct earned the praise of their superiors and the respect of their enemies. Forced to endure great hardship, the Regiment was widely acclaimed for its discipline and bravery. Greatly depleted in number, they returned to Delaware victorious in January 1783.
That was hardly the end for the regiment. The 198th Signal Battalion in the Delaware Army National Guard traces itself directly to the Delaware Regiment.
Not far from the current capitol is the former state house, now a museum. It was open.
In fact, I got a tour.
I was happy to learn that here, in this very room, the delegates to the Constitutional ratifying convention met, and made their quick and unanimous decision.
