2020

I didn't want Randy to be disappointed by not going to Lincoln, to visit his brother's birthplace, but as soon as he saw how close we were to the world's largest ball of twine, he quickly decided we should head south and see that instead. No sooner had we crossed the border into Kansas than we saw a sign for the Center of the United States. What???! We had already been to the Center... in South Dakota! Obviously we took the turn off and there it was -- a gorgeous little rest stop, with a tiny little chapel, marking the geologic center of the lower 48 states. This had been the center up until 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted into the U.S., and Kansas was proud of it! A short ways down the road from the Center, we came to the world's largest ball of twine. Call it cheesy if you want, but if you can't get excited about Americana and a tradition that brought a town together then you are going to miss out on so much fun! Van's favorite part of...

As if the Geological Center of the United States, Deadwood, Sturgiss, Spearfish Canyon and Mt. Rushmore weren't enough, we discovered that South Dakota has so much more to offer. Too much to explore on this trip. But we did add in a few more stops. From Mt. Rushmore it is less than a half-hour drive to get to Crazy Horse Memorial . Like Mt. Rushmore, Crazy Horse is a carving in the side of a mountain, mostly created from strategically placed dynamite blasts. Korczak Ziolkowski, one of the men who worked on Mt. Rushmore, was approached by Chief Henry Standing Bear and the Lakota people to create a monument to one of their own heroes. Ziolkowski agreed with one stipulation: that he would never take any government funding--his own way of protesting the unfair treatment of our government on native people. Ziolkowski turned down multiple million-dollar offerings from the government in his lifetime. It is for this reason that the monument remains a work-in-progress to this day. The ...

I was very much looking forward to our trip to Wyoming. Between my junior and senior years in college I spent the summer at Yellowstone National Park in the northwest corner of the state. It was by far the most foundational summer of my life. My parents probably thought I'd "gone prodigal" (to steal a phrase from Greg Laurie) because I wasn't much interested in hearing from home. But it was the first time I'd ever been immersed in a culture so different from the one I had grown up in. And I couldn't get enough of it. When you are surrounded by people who have always been where you have been and have grown up the way you have grown up, no one thinks to ask who you are. They assume they know. They assume you are just like them. And you can start to assume you are too. But these people I spent the summer with were people from every state and multiple countries and a variety of backgrounds and they all wanted to know: who are you? what do you like? ...

Randy and I got up early one morning, leaving Van in bed at Robert and Suzanne's house, and went into the city of Boise. We met up with some former employee's of Randy's and delighted in catching up with them over breakfast. It was exciting to see them making Boise their home -- finding a sense of place where they could become who they were created to be. When they had to head in to work, Randy and I walked downtown Boise, checking out the courthouse, the Basque district, local coffee shops and more. It was fun to be a tourist again and was the momentum we needed for the next leg of our adventure. Since we'd picked him up, Van regularly asked if we were going to see Niagra Falls. And each time we reminded him that Niagra Falls was on the complete other side of the United States, and that while we were going pretty far east, we weren't going that far. We'd been together for 3 weeks by now, and Van wasn't giving up. Randy and I were starting to wish we...