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.

I’m on my way to a conference and it feels a little strange. The last time this happened was June 13, 2019, when I set out from home to attend the Lincoln Highway Association Conference in Rock Springs, Wyoming. I spent six days getting to that conference but will spend less than three getting to this one. The journal is here with the first day posted: 

In 2013, my Christmas Escape destination was a West Virginia state park and since then I’ve escaped to state parks in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. Last year, I didn’t escape to anywhere as travel was seriously curtailed by the ongoing pandemic. I’m a little excited to again hit the road and quite happy to be returning to West Virginia. Before I get to Hawks Nest State Park for a Christmas Day buffet, I’ll stop at a couple of other West Virginia parks, and before that, I take note of the Winter Solstice. That’s the Winter Solstice sunrise at Fort Ancient in the photo.

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

I just posted the journal for the first day of a trip that will take me out of Ohio heading east on US-20 and see me return on US-20 from the west. In between, I intend to get to the west coast by following the Yellowstone Trail from one end to the other. The eastern portions of the trip will be through semi-familiar territory and the two routes even overlap quite a bit. West of Illinois, the two paths separate from each other as well as from places I have been.

This entry is to let blog only subscribers know about the trip and to provide a place for comments. The journal is here.