Summits to Salt Flats

Lincoln Highway Conference 2014 Locator map

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Day 1
Special Relativity

Day 2
A Couple of Surprises

Day 3
Ruts, Rails, & Bricks

Day 4
Displayed Stuff

Day 5
Into Colorado

Day 6
Hang On Loopy

Day 7
Loopy Hang On

Day 8
LH Runner Up

Day 9
A Scenic Deviation

Day 10
One Last Loop

Day 11
Cut Off at the Cutoff

Day 12
Last Loop Redux

Day 13
Surprise!

Day 14
A Spike and a Spiral

Day 15
A Three State Day

Day 16
Go, Go, Geyser

Day 17
National Monuments

Day 18
Facerocks

Day 19
Keep Pushin' Till It's Understood

Day 20
Meat, Veggies, & Memories

Day 21
Dream On

Day 22
The Home Stretch

June 29, 2014 (day 22)
Before moving onto expressways for the last hundred or so miles, I had a locally brewed lunch followed by locally frozen dessert.

June 28, 2014 (day 21)
A Field of Dreams stop in the middle of a little US-20. Then a smidgen of Lincoln Highway in the middle of a lot of US-52.

June 27, 2014 (day 20)
A not-quite-presidential library, a tall vegetarian, and a meat museum -- surprises all -- made my day.

June 26, 2014 (day 19)
This was pretty much a driving day with the Badlands on one end and the Corn Palace on the other.

June 25, 2014 (day 18)
The sculptures are big and the roads are scenic in these parts. I took an afternoon break on sawdust and finished the day at a big drug (There's aspirin in there somewhere.) store.

June 24, 2014 (day 17)
For a day with no planned stops, I managed a couple of Classics.

June 23, 2014 (day 16)
I had problems with time and distance and didn't do all that well on direction either. But I saw Old Faithful and enough Yellowstone to solidify my belief in its awesomeness then stumbled in to a whole new state.

June 22, 2014 (day 15)
I exited Utah, sliced through a corner of Idaho, and ended the day in Wyoming. There was plenty of good looking stuff, both manmade and otherwise, along the way.

June 21, 2014 (day 14)
After a good breakfast and a pleasant meeting, I was off to the spike site with a jaunt to a jetty tacked on.

June 20, 2014 (day 13)
This was presentation day with two speakers in the morning and another two in the afternoon. The day ended with the awards banquet where I got a big surprise.

June 19, 2014 (day 12)
Today's bus tour headed east from Tooele and eventually reached the Ogden Loop that I drove on Tuesday. Though the road looked a little familiar, the places where we stopped and being on a bus made it feel very different.

June 18, 2014 (day 11)
We were denied one of our primary targets but I got a second chance at another and there was sunshine and great scenery all day.

June 17, 2014 (day 10)
It was a day of rain as I finally finished driving the old road past Church Buttes and the Ogden Loop. The day ended with a conference dinner and the promise of a better -- and earlier -- tomorrow.

June 16, 2014 (day 9)
I took the chef's advice and drove through some nice Wyoming scenery to a one time boom town.

June 15, 2014 (day 8)
Some of the rutted road I drove today may have once been an official Lincoln Highway alternate route or maybe none of it was. In any case, it was all fun and led to a delightful hotel and a wonderful dinner.

June 14, 2014 (day 7)
I started off with a little sole searching then went off course to find a repainted pylon. The day's big surprise was chatting with a leprechaun in Wyoming.

June 13, 2014 (day 6)
I stayed with the official Colorado Loop to the center of Denver then high tailed it back to Fort Morgan to pickup the unofficial Greeley Branch.

June 12, 2014 (day 5)
I drove to the outskirts of Denver on the short lived Colorado Loop of the Lincoln Highway with a little DLD and a steampunk monkey along the way.

June 11, 2014 (day 4)
I covered quite a few miles on the expressway but still managed to check out a couple of museums and revisit a Lincoln Highway icon.

June 10, 2014 (day 3)
I drove some new-to-me Lincoln Highway including some barely maintained dirt and some well maintained brick. In between I visited a jail and a railroad museum.

June 9, 2014 (day 2)
A pair of roadside attractions that I wasn't expecting followed by a pair of roadside icons that exceeded expectations.

June 8, 2014 (day 1)
This was pretty much an all expressway day with a little exploring in Peoria.

Prelude 2 - May 8, 2014
I have now plotted my route to the conference and it includes not only the Denver and Ogden loops but the one through Omaha as well. Even with the fixed dates of the conference, I could get there without much of a schedule except there are a couple of historic hotels I really want to work in and that means, to prevent finding no room at the inn, advanced booking with a fixed arrival date. Nailing down a few nights scattered throughout the trip did not leave much more flexibility than nailing them all so that's what I did. I now have rooms booked for all but the first of the nine nights I'll be on the road getting to Tooele. The historic Plains Hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was at the top of my list when I first started thinking of lodging for the trip. In addition, I've booked the historic Park Hotel in Denison, Iowa, the historic Elk Mountain Hotel in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, the semi-historic motel at Little America, Wyoming, and a couple of promising B&Bs. The return trips appears, at least for the present, to be more spontaneous.

I've posted a locator map (button at right of title) that includes part of the return trip through Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore. Whether I actually stop at either place remains to be seen since I'm guessing they will probably be overrun with enough tourist to scare me off. Getting to Denison and home from Mount Rushmore will essentially be all expressway.

Prelude 1 - April 30, 2014
I seriously thought that, after the really big doings for the Lincoln Highway Association's centennial last year, I might skip this year's conference to let things like my bank account recover. Then they started talking about entering the "forbidden zone". This particular "forbidden zone" is the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah which has blocked access to a portion of the original Lincoln since 1941. Tooele, Utah, is where the 2014 conference will take place and the organizers thought it likely that they could get permission to at least run a bus tour into the heavily guarded area. So, since this could be my only chance to see beyond the fences and warning signs, I decided to work it in.

I've registered for the conference and have my motel booked and I've some ideas for getting there and back. Those ideas need a lot of refining but I'm hoping to drive two other short lived alignments, Denver, Colorado, and Ogden, Utah, on the way out and visit at least one new-to-me state, South Dakota, on the way back.

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