Friday, August 30th, 2002

Couldn’t sleep, so I got up and printed the set of pictures for the E.C. Lawrence Volksmarch from 3 to 4:30, and then finally got back to sleep. The predictable result was that I slept in later than we had planned and we didn’t leave until 7:15--Monika was not amused. But the trip up I-270 to Breezewood, PA, and west through Pennsylvania and Ohio went more quickly than we had anticipated because they had stopped road construction for the Labor Day weekend and there was very little truck traffic. So we drove like the wind and arrived in Montpelier, Ohio about 3:30 to check into the Ramada Inn. We then drove over to the county fairgrounds to start the first walk of the O-Michiana weekend.

The Montpelier walk circled the country fairgrounds before heading north along the St. Joseph river. Some of the barns were occupied and people were lounging about the stables, so it looked to me like they were getting ready for the county fair or a show of some kind. One surprise was a one-room log cabin in a corner of the fairgrounds which was called the Lott house. We took a short turn through the town and joined a wooded path along the St. Joseph river, which winds all over northwestern Ohio, southern Michigan, and northern Indiana before finally emptying into Lake Michigan at St. Joseph. At this point we were pretty far upstream, so the river was relatively small but pretty.

The final leg of the route re-crossed the railroad tracks and zigzagged past the town playhouse to the high school. We passed some kids with super-soakers, and they obligingly squirted us to help us keep cool. We saw lots of kids playing on the street who didn’t seem to be afraid to talk to strangers, which was how I remembered my childhood in the Midwest. The high school emblem for Mountpelier was a locomotive and I speculated that steam locomotives had been built here, but no one I talked to knew anything about it. As we returned to the finish point, the folks from the executive council were just arriving and starting the walk. A local group had laid out a lot of food options including grilled chicken, brats, hotdogs, baked beans, potato salad, various types of home-made pies, and brownies. That all looked just so inviting that we decided to have dinner right then and there.

Back at the hotel we relaxed in the Jacuzzi for a while before turning in for the night. We had never had a Jacuzzi in our hotel room, so it took a while to understand how to operate everything correctly, especially the volume of the jets. But it was fun trying everything out and left us ready for bed. The only down side of our room was the lack of an outside window. I’m not sure why they didn’t put one in the outside wall, but we found the lack of one to be quite disorienting because we had no clue whether it was day or night.

Saturday, August 31st, 2002

We were up early and decided to walk over to the café across the street for breakfast because we expected the hotel restaurant to be expensive, which we later found out was not the case. The café was a greasy spoon, complete with an ashtray on every table. Unfortunately, Monika’s waffle wasn’t very good although I had some quite decent blueberry pancakes. Nevertheless, we were fueled and ready to drive over to Auburn, Indiana for the Volksmarch there.

The Auburn Volksmarch began in the parking lot of a hospital on the edge of town, and we bought a cast-metal Duesenberg, two T-shirts, and a couple of B-award patches before we started the walk. The walk meandered through some city side streets before passing the central business district, which was already cordoned off for the upcoming parade. Along the way we saw one beautiful antique car being washed for the parade and several others drove by on the way to the parade staging area. We continued into town and looped past a small park with the checkpoint before returning to the central business district and the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum.

There was an optional detour through the museum (for an extra 1 km), which we decided to do. I was in hog heaven and started taking pictures left and right of all the beautiful antique cars exhibited there. The first floor was solely the province of Duesenbergs and Cords, all in pristine condition. After an hour there we headed upstairs and were surprised to find another complete set of exhibition rooms, some with Auburns and the others containing a wide variety of antique, classic, and racing cars including Indy cars. Since we had spent an hour already, we decided to come back after completing the volksmarch and watching the parade—besides, I was out of pictures.

The return route was quite direct; we walked straight back to the center of town and turned right past the courthouse square to head back out to the hospital. All along the way we saw more and more antique cars gathering. After having our books stamped, we retrieved our car and drove back to center of town to a parking lot that the Boy Scouts were guarding for $2 a pop. There I downloaded the pictures to the computer and wiped the camera memory so I could take another set of the parade.

But first, we had a very good buffet lunch at the Auburn Café right off the courthouse square for only $5.50 apiece. I was happily munching some kind of strawberry shortcake type of dessert when the parade started, so we cleaned up and rushed out to find a good vantage point. We settled on a fairly deserted street corner and Monika sat in the partial shade of the building whilst I stood on the street corner to get the best possible angle for the camera shots and short movie clips of the cars passing by.

What a parade it was! First came cars from the 50s and 60s, some of which I remembered from my youth. Then came the old Duesenbers, Cords, and Auburns, from the 20s and 30s in no discernable order. All were in immaculate condition and polished to a fair-thee-well. Most ran just beautifully, but one car stopped dead in the street in front of us and had to be push started by the owners plus a large group of onlookers. When it finally started and drove off in a cloud of smoke, the crowd erupted in cheers. We were also entertained by a local community brass band playing some old ditties. Clowns cavorted among the crowd and collected donations for the band. Monika bought a flag to support the disabled veterans organization. At the end of the parade was a section of “works in progress” where the hulk of the car was displayed on a flat bed trailer along with a sign stating how much progress had been made—usually in years of work!

All together the parade lasted around two hours, by which time I had run out of pictures and Monika had run out of shade, so we called it quits and returned to the car where I downloaded pictures from the camera yet again. We wanted to drive back to the museum but had to stop 4 blocks short due to the cordoned off streets. So we walked the final stretch and I started taking pictures of the second floor exhibits. I was happy that I had enough time to read all the placards, which were just chock-full of interesting information. Some of the placards detailed the history of car manufacturing in Indiana, and we were surprised at how many companies made cars before the Great Depression—over 50 different companies as I recall. Many were just “assemblers” that contracted out all pieces of the car and just put them together, but others like Auburn and Duesenberg were full-fledged car manufacturers that designed and built every component.

The cutest story was about a 1927 Auburn which was absolutely pristine and had just a couple thousand miles on it. The story was that a farmer was unhappy about his daughter dating a certain fellow, and he offered to buy her a new car if she would stop seeing the guy. She agreed and the farmer bought her the Auburn which she drove for a few months. But she kept seeing the guy and the farmer finally found out. In a rage, he took back the car and put it into a barn where it stayed for the next 50 years! It was just a lovely car, but I did wonder how the girl and her boyfriend had made out. After we had seen and photographed everything, we left to have an evening snack at a Subway before heading back to the hotel and another evening of fun and frolic in the Jacuzzi.

Sunday, September 1st, 2002

We hoped to squeeze in two Volksmarches on Sunday, so we trotted down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast and were pleasantly surprised to find the food was good and prices reasonable. That gave us an early start for our drive up to Coldwater, Michigan, for our first walk.

The Coldwater YRE started in from a Holiday Inn along a busy main street, but we soon branched off to follow a streamside park. I found gorgeous yellow antique touring car sitting in the park which stood still for me taking a picture. I also found a nice blue heron feeding in a pond who did not stand still for my picture but instead flew off down the river—you can just see a speck of heron on the picture that I finally snapped of him.

From the park we curved back into town and started what became a tour of beautiful old homes. The fanciest ones were Victorians, and they were painted in what appeared to be the original outlandish color schemes. Some were more Federal-era homes that had more sedate color schemes but were equally well-kept. In the center of town was a small pocket park with artillery pieces and 50-caliber machine guns, which seemed wildly out of place in such a peaceful town. On the way back to the finish point we found an Arby’s and stopped in for a quick lunch. All in all, this was a very nice small town walk, particularly if you like old houses.

After Coldwater, we drove cross-country to Adrian, Michigan, for our next walk, which started inside a hospital. It was early afternoon and already getting hot, so we were thankful to have a short break in air conditioning before setting out for our second walk of the day. The Adrian walk wound down some city streets before turning east and heading for the center of the city and the county courthouse. As we zig-zagged through the central district, we were happy to see a dairy freeze and stopped to order some ice cream. There we met Craig and Faith from a Toledo walking club, who were also taking a respite from the walk with an ice cream break. We continued on past a section of classic older homes and circled back to enter a rails-to-trails hiking path that Craig said went for about 6 miles. After talking with an old Elvis impersonator and his wife at the checkpoint (he showed us a laminated photo of him in the Elvis costume in earlier years), we went a short distance on the hiking path and returned on the city streets to the finish point.

We were pretty tired but thought we might be able to eke out another 5 km on some YRE; consequently we drove south and west back through Michigan and Ohio to the YRE at Archbold, which was more or less on the way back to the hotel. We stopped at the Sauder Inn to get the start/finish box, but we both found out we were just too stiff to face walking for another hour. So we bagged the idea of the volksmarch and instead started to look for places to eat. Since the restaurant in the complex was closed, we headed for Archbold and hoped for the best.

What we found in Archbold was a café with stainless steel doors and a sign proclaiming it to be Mom’s Diner. From the outside it looked clean, if somewhat garishly decorated, so we took our chances and walked in. The interior was a smorgasbord of 1950s-era diner accroutements. Neon signs for everything decorated each wall. Formica tables rimmed with stainless steel reflected this abundance of color in gaudy but pleasing ways. The booths were, of course, covered in red and white plastic but we found them surprisingly comfortable. The ambiance was 1950’s diner, complete to a Wurlizter jukebox framed with neon lights and decorated on the edges with bubbling tubes of water. I don’t know if it was a real antique, but it certainly played real 45 rpm records. I put in $ .75 and chose five of my favorite oldies for mood music with our dinner—“Good Golly Miss Molly”, “The Twist”, and “Rock Around the Clock” among others.

The cuisine was quintessentially American—I mean, would you expect salads in a place like this? Monika had meatloaf and I had the roast beef special smothered in gravy. It wasn’t haute cuisine (or any of the other cuisines), but it really was quite tasty and filling, if not low fat. While we were waiting for our meal, I started doing what I call “phantom photography” where I just place the camera on the table in front of me and press the shutter button to take pictures or movies. By watching the back panel display out of the corner of my eye, I could get a rough idea of what was in the picture and I simply trusted to the automatics to do the rest. The advantage was that the camera was never up to my face in the “taking a picture” position, so we didn’t disturb any of the other patrons. After we were finished I did, however, go over to the Wurlitzer and take a couple of close-ups. From Archbold it was a hop, skip, and jump back to our hotel and another evening cavorting in the Jacuzzi.

Monday, September 2nd, 2002

Since the plan was to walk in the morning and then drive on to see Lois in Wisconsin, we had to pack and check out after breakfast. The walk in Paulding, Ohio, was about 20 miles south of the hotel, and we took pictures of several barns on the way, the most striking one being an octagonal barn.

The starting point for the Paulding walk was in a picnic shelter in a small park. We did two intersecting loops through the town with a stop back at the start/finish to act as a checkpoint—very efficient, these Ohioans! The town was a typical quaint midwestern town—we passed the high school band going on a bus trip to play at some event—pure Americana. But we didn’t really see too much of the town as we were chatting with some folks for the entire second half of the walk. Monika was talking with Nancy, the President of the AVA, and I was talking with a woman who wrote poetry as a hobby. We discussed writing styles of different authors and, of course, our children as we walked along. We found an interesting difference in the triggering conditions for poetry: she writes poems under deadlines for people’s birthdays or other special occasions while I write poetry only when strongly moved by emotions. So the main recollection I have of the Paulding walk was a very nice conversation while perambulating through a typical midwestern town. After getting our books stamped we took some pictures of the entire assembly of folks putting on the event and reluctantly returned to our car—they were nice folks.

We decided to drive across Indiana on Route 30, which went quite quickly from Fort Wayne to Valporaiso, and then we encountered more traffic lights, and especially red ones. We connected with I-94 north to take the tollway around Chicago to Burlington. Traffic was still quite light, probably due to the Labor Day weekend, and we arrived at Lois’s about 3:30. She had just returned from shopping and was ready for an early dinner, so we had some great pork chops left over from the Burlington Chocolate Fest (the big employer in town is a Nestle chocolate factory). Afterwards we drove into Waterford to see the condominium she was thinking of buying after she sold the dome home. They were situated smack dab in the middle of the Fox River on an island which could only be reached by a covered bridge! Each of the condos on the shoreline came complete with a boat slip, and most were occupied by small craft. I joked that we would donate our sailing dinghy to her if she bought an shoreline unit! As it is, she is trying to get rid of several decades of accumulated junk to get ready for the move. From Waterford we drove over to visit Merlin’s grave in the military cemetery before returning to the dome. The grave site was now covered with nicely tended grass and looked very peaceful.

At the dome we nibbled on some kringle we purchased on the way home and caught up on what had been happening with all our relatives. Fortunately most of the news was good news, and we wrapped it up around 10 to hit the sack.

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2002

Our goal for the day was to do the Madison, Wisconsin, Volksmarch so that we would get another state capital on our list. The ultimate goal is to do a Volksmarch in all 50 states and 51 capital cities. We are just over half way there and needed Madison. Lois volunteered to come with even though she wasn’t quite certain about walking 10 km, and she drove us northwest to Madison via Delaven and Janesville—very pretty country.

In Madison, we parked in a garage one block off the capital square and ponied up the quarters for a 4-hour stay. We thought that would be plenty even with having lunch in between, but when we returned in the end we only had 8 minutes left! The capital square in Madison lies on an isthmus between Lake Manona and Lake Mendota, which also has the basic downtown business district. We found the box at the concierge desk of the Inn On The Park which is a really fancy place. The first little spur trail of this walk led out to an overlook for Lake Mendota (very pretty) and back to the capitol building. The main loop of the walk led from the capital square out along the shore of Lake Manona and back through the downtown area. The majority of this part of the walk is through or next to the University of Wisconsin campus, which is quite extensive and kind of gradually merges with the downtown area.

The weather was warm even this far north, and folks were sailing on the lake right next to the old student union. A former student had described the die-hard sailboard sailors in wetsuits, but today they were just in swimsuits. Two sailboards with colorful sails were criss-crossing the lake just off shore, and one young woman was putting a sailing dinghy through its paces from a nearby wharf. Since it was the wharf for the UW sailing club, I guessed that she was demonstrating she could handle the dinghy so they would let her take it out.

After the wharf area, the path along the lake shore became a nice path through the woods. Lots of young folk were walking, jogging, or bicycling on the path, but it was broad enough for all of us. We turned inland just before a large boathouse and crossed the western end of the campus that featured the agricultural research section. The large exhibition building we kind of expected, but it was slightly disconcerting to see two large farm silos sitting there just a few blocks from the downtown business district! We crossed some railroad tracks and meandered uphill through a faculty ghetto area of older, well-kept houses before curling back past the UW football stadium, where we paused for lunch.

The final stretch jogged back through a long stretch of the campus to the downtown business district, which seemed very vibrant and had an interesting collection of businesses. Partly, I think, this is due to the built-in business base created by the nearby population of college students. The trail wrapped up by circling the capital square to the Inn, so we got to see the Capitol building with the golden figure on top from all vantage points before ending the walk.

We retrieved the car and drove due east to Milwaukee to see if we could connect with Tony, stopping at a Borders bookstore for a literary pause along the way. We waited a while at Tony’s house before giving up and having dinner nearby, after which we drove home to the dome for the night.

Wednesday, September 4th, 2002

I replaced the dinning room light switch, put a toilet-paper holder in the bathroom, and finished stapling up some loose insulation in the basement while Lois and Monika went shopping. Then we all carried out 5 or 6 chairs and pieces of a table down the hill to the side of the road while we waited for a roofing contractor to come at 10 o’clock and give an estimate on re-roofing the dome. Unfortunately, when he came and saw the dome, he said his company did not roof domes at all. So Lois was back to searching for another roofer to make an estimate on the job.

We left to drive south to Champaign-Urbana while Lois got ready for a lunch with her church women’s club. The drive down was uneventful and we arrived around 3:30, which turned out to be shortly before Martin arrived from his latest trip to the Argonne Lab! We finally got through to Martin and went over to take a quick tour of the cooperative near campus where he lives. It was a large old house divided into 14 bedrooms plus a large kitchen and common areas. It seemed to be well-organized coop with household duties carefully assigned and distributed among the members. After saying hello to the grand-kitties Cactus and Penney, we watched Martin make a birthday cake for me (belated) and I got a great book on the way physicists think about neural networks, which should be interesting! Later we went out to dinner with Martin and his girlfriend Jennifer before coming back to have the birthday cake, complete with candles! The folks at the coop all helped sing “Happy Birthday” and then helped eat the cake!! At least in a coop you don’t have to worry about leftovers! Hah! After all this, we were pooped and headed back to the motel for the night.

Thursday, September 5th, 2002

We had arranged to meet Martin around noon, so we decided to do the Champaign YRE first thing in the morning. We located the start box at Grandy’s and found they had two versions of the walk this year, the old route and essentially a reversed route which was the one we took. We looped around a high school, middle school, and a small park to the south and then walked along O’Malley’s Alley which is a short trail converted from an old inter-urban railroad line. The last part of the route looped north along two very pretty streamside parks before returning to Grandy’s. We still had some time, so I decided to drive south to Arcola to visit the grave of Mom and Dad Winterringer. The drive down was quick and we found the cemetery on the outskirts almost immediately, but finding the graves took us over an hour and one fruitless trip to the Arcola town offices in the middle of town. We finally found the headstone no more than 30 feet from where we had first parked, which was rather frustrating, but we paid our respects and called Martin to tell him we would be late before starting back.

Martin was hungry as a bear, so we went to Mykondos café west on Green street from the campus. This cafe has two claims to fame: the menu features 50 different kinds of hamburgers (no kidding) and an unlicensed bandit radio station that broadcasts from the attic (maybe kidding). Martin had the taco burger and Monika had the Hawaiian burger, while I settled for a gyro on pita—all of them were really good. The service was by a waiter who had a blend of cheeky and cheerful which I appreciated, so all in all I’d give this hole-in-the-wall good ratings for food, ambience, and price. Then we went back to the coop and played with the cats and chatted while Martin did his laundry in fits and starts.

Jennifer had two of her works on display at a nature center in Crystal Lake Park in Urbana, so we left around 6 and drove over to see the exhibition. The exhibition focused on medical illustrations or nature themes in a wide variety of media, so it was quite interesting. One of Jennifer’s works was a black-and-white drawing of a deer skull done with carbon-dust. She had used beautifully muted shading and gray tones to softly delineate the skull. I asked how she did that, and she described an extraordinarily painstaking process requiring well over 50 hours of labor and many different kinds of brushes to create it. Jennifer’s other drawing was a gouache drawing of a pitcher plant, which was quite detailed and colorful. Some of the other exhibits were drawings using pens or using Adobe Illustrator as a computer medium, and each medium gave a very distinct flavor to the finished product.

We headed back to the coop for dinner, which as Jennifer remarked was a medley of carbohydrates. The main course was vegetarian and meat lasagna accompanied by bread, potatoes, and rice with soup. The ambience with 16 people eating at 3 tables was rather like a very large family having a holiday dinner, but everyone was really nice and we enjoyed it. Some folks thought the lasagna was overdone, but I had a piece of each kind and really liked the crunchy texture—gives the jaw muscles exercise! We capped off the night by going to a custard place on Kirby avenue, where I had a cold fudge (no hot fudge) and Monika had a “tortoise” which combined caramel and cold fudge toppings. Yum! Then we headed back to the motel while the rest of the gang returned to the coop.

Friday, September 6th, 2002

We had a quick “continental breakfast” (translate as a couple of bowls of cereal) before we reluctantly left Champaign-Urbana for the drive home. But we had decided to do a couple more state capitals on the way by taking a southern route and catching Frankfort, Kentucky, and Charleston, West Virginia on the route home. So we headed east and south to Indianapolis before turning straight south to Louisville and then east on I-64 to Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky.

The Frankfort Volksmarch starts in the YMCA in the middle of town that had a free parking garage, which kept the car in the shade while we walked. We started around 2:45 p.m. and the temperature felt like it was in the 90s. The walk was a large, irregular loop with two big lobes. The first part zigzagged through a residential district with many historic buildings, each described by a detailed bronze plaque, and then crossed a “singing” bridge. This was an old steel bridge with a steel mesh surface for the decking. I took a picture and then a movie to get a record of the sound that the car tires made while crossing the bridge. It was really more like a humming sound than singing, but then again I suppose you shouldn’t expect the Mormon Tabernacle choir!

From the singing bridge we walked to the state capital, which was quite impressive. The capital is built on a hilltop in the center of a large circular field giving vistas in all directions. Our route led us on a ring road around the field so we had really good views of all sides of the capital. We also saw a very large “floral clock” built on a small hill which had a clock face entirely of flowers and two enormous steel hands to show the time (it was correct, too!). The Governor’s Mansion was a very nice white mansion just off the ring road. It also had floral gardens in front with U.S. and Kentucky flags flying from the light posts. In some ways the mansion resembled a smaller, more delicate version of the White House.

Completing the loop around the Capitol, we strolled down the parkway leading back to town, branching off to hit the sweetest checkpoint we’ve yet encountered—a candy shop specializing in hand-made bourbon chocolates. The chocolates tasted great and we bought a bag to take with, but we were really hot and needed a glass of ice water and that was not available. Oh well. We re-crossed the river and turned uphill to the city cemetery, which is at least a kilometer long and laid out on a bluff above the river. There we made a loop around the perimeter and visited the grave and monument to Daniel Boone, who was quite a trailblazer in early America. He started before the Revolutionary War opening up trails into from Virginia into eastern Kentucky and by his death in the early 1800s he had blazed trails as far west as Missouri. It must have been quite a life.

From the cemetery we had a pretty straight shot back through the center of Frankfort. The central district is fairly small (the city itself is also fairly small) and has some nice brick storefronts from the late 1800s, I think. We saw the oldest house in Frankfort, made of cut stone, and some other historical buildings along the way back to the YMCA. All in all, this was a very interesting capital walk with several points of interest and many nice views along the way.

We drove eastward on I-64 for another hour or so before stopping at a Ramada in Morehead, Kentucky, for the night. Alas, there was no Jacuzzi room available at the discount rate, but we were consoled by having a nearby Shoney’s available for a nice dinner.

Saturday, September 7th 2002

Continuing eastward on I-64, we arrived in Charleston, West Virginia, right around the time the outfitter’s store opened at 10 a.m. I played with the friendly black Labrador “guard” dog for a bit before signing in and starting our walk. The Charleston walk is arranged as a large rectangle and is surprisingly level given the jagged terrain of West Virginia—I’d rate it definitely a 1. Most of the walk was along shaded side streets along the banks of the Kanawha River that bisects the town, so that helped keep the heat down a bit. Some of the trees were really majestic, old oaks that were just beautiful. Walking downstream toward the capitol, we saw pontoon boats and speedboats plying the river, which was so placid I suspected it was dammed at this point.

The capitol building is located on the other side of the Kanawha, but the point of farthest extent of the Volksmarch is just across the river from it so you get a really good view. While I was taking pictures, a speedboat towing a water skier came roaring by to give me an interesting foreground. On the way back, we saw a 2-deck excursion ship chugging down river to the capitol with the stern paddle wheel thrashing the water and glistening in the sun. I took a movie to record some of the brass band music that drifted across the water to us. We also were passed by a freight train on the way back, and I took another movie as it went roaring past us on its way east. You just never know what you will see on a Volksmarch! All in all, we thought this was a nice capital walk. But we did encounter several folks who simply glared at us in stony silence when we greeted them, and had I one person come rushing out of his house to yell at me for taking pictures of the river boats. Other folks were quite friendly, so I don’t know what was going on but you might want to be more circumspect than I was while doing the walk.

From Charleston we headed east on I-79 to US 30 and drove straight across West Virginia to get back home. The 2-lane roads were twisty and curvy, but it was as pretty as everyone says. We stopped to gape at Seneca Rocks, which is a really large, impressive rock formation along the way, and got a big laugh out of a sign on a 3-mile section of divided highway that proclaimed it to be “Robert C. Byrd Appalachian Highway System”. We thought it was just wonderfully appropriate to name the new divided highways being built almost entirely at U.S. government expense after Byrd, who is clearly the Prince of Pork Barrel Politics for West Virginia! Although we faced some 10% grades coupled with 25-mph curves in the center of the state, driving across was quicker and far more scenic, but also more demanding, than taking the interstates around it. We arrived home about 6:15, which gave us time for a quiet dinner and a relaxing evening at home. Over our 9-day vacation we did 9 walks and picked up 3 state capitals, but the high point of the trip really was seeing our relatives. Love you all.