Today we ended our five-week "backwards" journey on the Lincoln Highway, stopping a state and a half shy of our intended goal of Addison, PA. The longing to see the museum where my childhood heroine, Annie Oakley, is celebrated won out. That, combined with an equally-strong longing to see another Great Lake while one was close by pulled us completely off the Lincoln route for the rest of the trip, as we need to be in D.C. in 3 days.
So...thinking back...
One question that remains is why people get so excited about following an old highway just for the sake of following it. Because it's there, I guess. Sadly, many of the motels and restaurants mentioned in our 2009 guidebook no longer existed. We didn't get to meet owners of establishments like these and hear stories from long ago as all the Lincoln Highway movies we'd watched suggested. The one restaurant we DID get to visit served horrid vegetables. The motels that did remain were high priced compared to modern places, and in the end we went for the lower-cost, more comfortable accommodations. We did manage to leave a few dollars behind through purchases, and several more through donations. At the beginning of the trip when we came upon closed establishments, I was willing to contribute a few thousand to band together with other Lincoln Highway enthusiasts and try to get them going again now that the highway's fame is beginning to build. At the end of the trip, I would love to see that happen but won't be sinking any retirement dollars into such an effort.
Sometimes it was really irritating to spend so much time hunting for poorly-marked road sections, making travel stressful rather than fun. The first couple of states we went through found us rejoicing and stopping to photograph every Lincoln marker we saw -- and also making very slow progress. That ended when we got to Nebraska and for the next 3 states the Lincoln was easy to find. Despite fewer frustrations, some of the fun and excitement was gone, too. And sometimes, driving through hours and hours of cornfields and country frankly got a little dull.
Travel became much easier once we could return to counting on Mapquest and GPS to get us where we wanted to be again, not stopping every few miles to find the little blue dot on the GPS screen marking our location and trying to find tiny roads on a small phone screen. But would I do it again? Traveling with a theme to pursue gives more of a goal and purpose. Overall, I highly recommend it. Once we heard of some people who had decided to try to visit every lighthouse in the U.S., and my feeling was that when you've seen 20 lighthouses, you've seen them all. But the focus on one specific thing helps you notice finer details, and gives some cohesion to the journey. So pick a route or a special theme -- just choose one that's more readily located.
I've pondered whether the waning excitement is just that we've lost the thrill of newness, and reflected on how there's something shallow in the soul that needs constant new experiences and new vistas. Haven't come up with a way to justify any deep benefit from spending my financial, mental and physical resources on trips like this. Still looking!
But, heading east from California, though we've been as far as Reno and Virginia City many times, it seemed around every corner there was something that took our breath away. Sometimes because we couldn't believe there was something like that so relatively close to home that we'd never seen, and sometimes just because the tall mountains were stunning, seeming to hold us in a protected mode. Great Basin National Park contained both the greatest underground beauty and intricate lacework of rocks in its Lehman Caverns, and the greatest views of the nighttime sky. I've never experienced such awe or realized how vast the heavens really are, even back as a little girl in Tyler, Texas where there wasn't much light pollution yet in the 1950s. Even the dry backwaters of Highway 50 constantly amazed. When we got to Omaha and on forward, things look -- well, pretty much like back home in East Texas/Dallas. Brick houses, lots of trees, not too many hills. Kind of comforting, but kind of reminded me of why travel in East Texas can get boring -- after the first 30 or 40 miles of lovely pine trees, it all looks the same. We're spoiled in the Bay Area where in half an hour in almost any direction you can be in a whole different world.
The overwhelming sense of what it must have been like to be a pioneer moving west, how easy it was to feel like icons of the past were with us, to 'channel' someone else on the Oregon Trail, at the Pony Express Stations, at the hilltop in Council Bluffs where Lincoln decided to make that city the eastern terminus of the Union Pacific. At Promontory Point and often as the railroad raced by, we could feel Cullen Bohannon beside us, and curse the names of evil railroad barons like Stanford and Huntington and Crocker and Durant. Maybe it's just because we're not as versed in history as we head east that we don't feel as connected.
I also think of people who are studying deep thoughts and thought trends, like my daughter who's getting a PhD in religious philosophy and finds anything I can talk about pretty shallow and boring. Others are out ministering to the poor, others remain cheerful and maintain their hope in God in difficult, impoverished or otherwise challenging situations. Some develop talents in music or art. Me, I do a pretty decent job at planning trips and outings -- I kinda excel at it, actually -- but in the end it's not that interesting to hear other people talk about their travels if all they can say is what they saw, and didn't really have any impact on their world as they went through it.
If we do set out on such a journey again, starting in New York and making it as far east as Indiana on the Lincoln, it'll have to be done more slowly. Time to do just one thing a day, sit around and ponder, write, talk to people, meet more local people. Some states deserve three weeks; all would be better with a week devoted to it. We'd travel lighter, and budget more money for eating out rather than eating in our room so we could mingle more with folks in public. I'd try harder to make connections in advance with other Lincoln Highway Association members, read more on the history of each state, go to church every Sunday and look for community activities we could join in on. It'd be nice to bring a few friends along -- but we'd have to have a group of really flexible, patient people.
And we'd try to go a little earlier in the fall, before so many attractions and museums start shutting down for the season. We missed most of Buffalo Bill's stuff and the museum in North Platte, where for several years every single train of soldiers that went through town during WWII was met, no matter what time of day, by women from many miles around with cakes and warm coffee. And I wouldn't skip the Archway Museum in Kearney just because it's slightly on the pricey side.
So, tomorrow it's off to the Garst Museum -- hoping to reconnect with my childhood love of a woman who could shoot better than any man. Then to DC to see friends of long ago, followed by a week at a timeshare in Williamsburg where I hope to spend some of the days doing absolutely nothing but reflecting and writing, not spending my evenings on Priceline trying to find something affordable but nice for the next night or two....
Ride 'em, Cowgirl!
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