This is just about as last minute as it is possible to get. I registered Monday night, booked my room Tuesday night, and started driving toward the conference  Wednesday morning. Trip announcement posts such as this are typically made when the first day’s journal is posted but not this time. That journal entry is not yet posted and neither is the journal for the final day of the preceding trip. Those things will eventually happen but for now, my real and cyber worlds are out of synch in a slightly different way than normal.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

The second part of that double country crossing trip on the National Old Trails Road and the Pike’s Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway is underway. When scheduling issues led to me splitting what was originally conceived as a single outing, I planned to start and end part 1 at the Ohio-Indiana border but it didn’t quite work out that way. For the sake of convenience, I slipped about a mile into Indiana, where the National Road and the National Old Trails Road diverge to begin the eastbound portion of the trip. Not reaching the state line on the westbound portion was not convenient at all. Road debris and a flat tire ended the trip about 90 miles early. So I have spent the first day of this outing returning to the scene of the interruption, covering those 90 miles, and getting started on Indiana. California, here I come.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

My on-again-off-again trip to the 2024 Society for Commercial Archeology conference in Nashville is definitely on and underway. Day one consisted mostly of getting there then ended in a reception at the Willie Nelson Museum near Opryland. A wonky internet connection and a full schedule delayed the posting of this and the first day’s journal and an itinerary fully packed with bus tours will undoubtedly delay the next couple of days but they will eventually get there.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

I am sure that many readers recognize the acronyms in the title. For those that don’t know, they represent the National Old Trails Road and the Pike’s Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway. These two named auto trails cross the USA east-west not too far from each other and not too far from my home. I intend to utilize this pair in crossing the country twice. Although I originally planned to make the journey in a single outing, I am now resigned to spreading it over two trips. Part 1, which I have just started, follows the NOTR east from the Ohio-Indiana border and returns to that border on the PPOO. I will return to that spot in the fall and finish following the PPOO westward then wrap things up by driving the NOTR back to Ohio. The journal for that first day of the trip, which is largely staging, has been posted here.

Calling this trip “haphazard” might be a little strong but plans really aren’t very firm. I started on Winter Solstice with some solid plans and also have plans for some stops in Virginia. I hope to eventually reach where my son lives in New York but what goes in between is pretty murky.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

I have written several times of being surprised to learn that my great-grandparents drove a Model T Ford to Florida and back in 1920. That surprise came many years ago and since then I have twice retraced their trip and wrote a book about the retracing. Letters my great-grandmother sent her daughter allowed me to follow their general path. A cousin and I dug into those letters as I prepared for the second retracing and were again surprised when we realized there were letters from a second Florida trip mixed in with them. There was great joy in that surprise along with a little disappointment. Unlike the 1920 letters, those from the second trip in 1923 did not document the entire adventure but trailed off mid-sentence shortly after the travelers reached the vicinity of Sebring, FL.

Of course, half a trip is better than no trip, and I’ve used those letters from 1923 to produce the route I’m now following. Granddad and Granny started their journey on October 29, 1923, and my original plan was to start my retrace exactly one hundred years later. But time constraints on the tail end of the outing have prompted me to set out just a few days early in hopes of making things a little more relaxed. At some point, I will be exactly where they were a century ago. There is no guarantee I’ll be able to sort out just where and when that is, though, but I do intend to try.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

US-127 is the shortest of the two United States Numbered Highways that pass through the county of my birth. It has naturally been on my list of roads to drive but it has been pretty low on the list and hasn’t received a lot of attention. That changed a little bit last year when I realized that its southern terminus is quite close to one of my favorite breakfast spots. It got another boost, and a date to hang a trip on when I learned of an opportunity to scratch off another list item while traveling the route. So I left home Tuesday morning and headed toward the northern terminus of US-127. I actually reached it and will begin driving the trip’s namesake highway in the morning. Even though today was really just getting ready to start, I did take some pictures and put together a journal page.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The journal is here.

The sun has set on the first day of the first “normal” Society Society for Commercial Archeology conference since 2019. The 2023 conference started Wednesday, May 31, in Erie, PA. The 2023 Jefferson Highway Association conference begins next Wednesday. The JHA’s first post-COVID conference took place last year but the site of this year’s conference (Mason City, IA) is where the pandemically postponed conferences of 2020 and 2021 were to take place. The Lincoln Highway Association also broke out of the COVID pause last year and will have things ready to go this year in Folsom, CA, starting June 12. There was a brief moment when I thought I might make it to all three conferences but reality soon set in. The logistics of getting to California following the conference in Iowa were just too much of a challenge for me. With apologies and sadness, the LHA conference was dropped. I will be attending the other two and there’s not a whole lot of time between them. What time there is will be spent in a fairly direct crossing of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. They have separate journals with a switch to the JHA trip planned after the last day of the SCA conference.

This entry lets blog-only subscribers know about the trip and provides a place for comments. The SCA trip journal is here and the JHA trip journal here.