On the Road Again...FLORIDA JAN - FEB 2011

We decided to leave the cold, snow and rain on the Martin Luther King holiday weekend as Debra had Friday through Monday off. Left Friday morning for Jacksonville Fl for our first nights stop and then it was on the road again for a fairly short drive south to our next stop. We are currently in Ft Pierce/Ft Lucie, FL at a KOA. Once we got here we liked the new small campground so much we decided to stay the week and leave this coming Friday (21 Jan 2011) for Key Largo for a week before going on to the Navy campground in Key West to dry camp for the first time. We were able to get a good deal on a bay front site at Key Largo that someone had canceled out on. Probably couldn’t get out of snow in New York...Our neighbors here in Fort Pierce are from Canada on the left and on the right is a huge rig from the Asheville, NC area. We looked so out of place when we got here as we had on turtle necks and sweatshirts!! It was in the 70’s when we got here but the temp as gone up each day and yesterday it got up to 83! Debra had Monday off as it was a Federal holiday so we did some exploring and went south along the coast to Jupiter, FL to see how the very wealthy live. We didn’t get to go to the restaurant Lynn, our neighbor, had recommended as it was closed, so it was back home to a local one. This afternoon I am off to the bait shop and to the pier to fish while Debra works. The boys are enjoying the doggie run and going on outings with us!! Will let you know how things are as we travel more southerly.

Corbin 2010

We left Door County, Wisconsin on June 26 after a pleasant week’s stay in our great wooded RV site at Tranquil Timbers Resort and the weather was just perfect. We took two days getting from Door County to Corbin, KY, stopping overnight (26 June) at the KOA in Remington, IN. Just twenty or so miles from where we stopped, we saw a state of the art 3,000 head dairy farm that offered tours to us city slickers. Just off I-65, it was an easy stop to make and provided quite interesting. We even got to see a new born calf and another being fed a specially screened colostrum (they hold off letting it feed on its mother's until after it's been screened for disease. You get to tour the "barns" via bus (so as not to commicate disease to the herd) and get to see their sand beds, their fans and misting system so as to ensure a "happy and stress free cow"...yep, they said that. We also got to see this elaborate milking system that keeps track of each cows production and knows whether or not she should get three spins around the milking machine or just one. And of course, we had to partake of the on site restaurant and ice cream parlor...yes, a very good stop indeed!
Well, ya'll, we are sorry to say our trip is just about over and we will be heading home on Friday the 9th of July. We just finished the family Donnahoo annual 4th of July get-together here in Corbin, KY (birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken) and as usual, it was a huge success. Terri, Debra's sister from Chicago had planned and fixed all the main meals and they were just outstanding. For an additional treat there was homemade fresh South Carolina peach ice cream that brought big smiles to everyone’s face!! The really hot weather held off until after the outing on the pontoon and ski boats on the lake just outside of Daniel Boone National Park. Most were pretty sunburned at the end of the day and had some sore legs from all the tries to stand on the skis and/or wake board. We have already made arrangements for one more annual get together here.
So friends, we hope you have enjoyed some of our special visits across this wonderful and beautiful country of ours and shared that experience through our words and pictures. I know we have enjoyed sharing them with you and simply can't wait for our next trip (I guarantee you...already in the planning stages)!

Door County, WI 19-26 Jun 2010

We departed our little KOA paradise in the Badlands the following morning, 18 June headed for Door County, WI, one of the top 10 vacation destinations in the country, "believe it or not". This would be a two day drive for us with the first stop was in Sioux Falls, SD where all we did was drive to a Middle Eastern “green” restaurant, Sanaa's Gourmet Mediterranean Restaurant. It was a treat as it was something new for us rather than our usual Indian cuisine. Sanaa is from Syria and it was quite a treat to see a restaurant, where you go straight to the buffet, sit down and eat with Sanaa herself offering Turkish coffee without one piece of paper being written on to indicate what you've eaten. It's a set price (extra if you want dessert and you KNOW we did! :-)) It's all on the honor system! After you've finished eating, you go back to the buffet and pay up. Neither of us could recall such an experience anywhere else in the States but in South Dakota and it felt oh soo good to know you could trust people like that! Anyway, another long day of driving on the 19th for our second stop in Oakdale, WI. Only interesting stop between Sioux Falls and Oakdale was the Spam Museum but alas, no stopping for us there...maybe next time :-). We left Door County, Wisconsin on June 26 after a pleasant week’s stay in our great wooded RV site at Tranquil Timbers Resort and the weather was just perfect. We made our home base in Sturgeon Bay, a historic waterfront community that dates back to 1835 and is nestled between the waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan. When you look at these waters they go as far as you can see and looks more like an ocean than a lake! There was even a Sunset Beach on the peninsula! We toured most of the area especially following the lighthouse trail. The prevalence of lighthouses on the Door Peninsula is directly related to its geography and the use of the Lake Michigan and Green Bay shipping lanes. The passage through and around the “DOOR” was often treacherous due to weather, shoals, reefs and fog, so a number of these lighthouses were build around the peninsula to aid navigation into harbor, through the dangerous straits (i.e. Oceans Door), and away from the shoals. Most of them were manned by families living in the quarters below but are now run via electronics. Sturgeon Bay is home to one of the most well known yacht builders for global cliental as well as shipbuilding of large commercial vessels. There are many historic B&Bs and inns and larger full service resorts along the shorelines. Door County is 70 miles long with about 300 miles of shoreline with plenty of green space to include 10 historic lighthouses, 5 state parks and more than 30 beachside parks. So many outdoor activities to partake of such as hiking, biking, fishing, rock climbing, parasailing, kite boarding, and water skiing. Kayaking is very big here and with over 200 ship wrecks in the area, scuba diving is also quite popular. This is home to lots of professional artists of all types and you can see the fruits of all their labors in the many galleries, studios, on stage and in the local concert halls throughout the county. Of note is the shop Scrimshanders, displaying the unique art of scrimshaw which is kept alive by Gary Kiracofe who expands on the history through his exclusive, one-of-a-kind collectibles and heirlooms. The work he did was amazing and we saw lots of pieces that we would have liked to have for the home. There are five local wineries which have a wide variety of award winning wines, and of course the great Wisconsin cheese shops and cherries which are grown there. Their big thing they are also known for is their Door County Fish Boils which is a local culinary tradition with Scandinavian roots that dates back to the county’s lumbering and fishing heydays and mixes locally caught Lake Michigan whitefish steaks, onions, and potatoes in a large kettle. It is cooked outdoors over an open wood fire and is highlighted by a picturesque “boil over” which sends flames soaring into the air with the oil from the fish being boiled over and signals that the dinner is ready. The dessert is usually cherry pie made from their local grown cherries. Needless to say, being the fish lovers we aren't, we opted out of this culinary delight. There are more than 3,000 acres of cherry and apple orchards in Door County, which adds to the county's beauty. The majority of the inland parts of the county are made up of farm land and dairy farms. Of course, we sampled some of the local food and especially liked one of the historic inns in the village called the Inn at Cedar Crossing. They did all their dessert and bread baking from scratch using only natural ingredients. Yum, yum!! There are local culinary schools and every year there is a three week culinary tour of Door County during the month of September which is a celebration of farm and food. There is a strong blend of both Moravian spiritual values and Norwegian and Scandinavian heritage that dates back to 1853 here and no kidding, you can kinda feel the uniqueness and quaintness of it all. Where else would you see a thatch roof with real life goats grazing on it?! They even have a fully operational Drive Inn theater there! Toy Story 3 and the Prince of Persia was playing but alas, we figured it would be well past our bedtime and too far to drive back to our home base to experience this blast from our past. After our treks, we decided we liked the eastern part of the county best as it was less crowded and harkens back to a simpler time. As previously mentioned, Door County was touted as “One of the Top Ten Vacation Destinations in North America” by Money Magazine. We decided it was due to the fact that it was the main get-away for folks from Chicago and Milwaukee to escape the city life. There are lots of beautiful homes and cottages tucked away in the woods along the shorelines that you cannot see unless you are touring the shores via boat or just happen to come upon some of them as we did. We are glad we got to stop by here but glad we didn’t make a special long trip from home to visit…we decided we preferred the New England coast much more.

Badlands 17 June 2010

Originally we thought we'd be able to take in the Badlands while at Mount Rushmore but alas that proved to be just too far away so we made a slight change to our itinerary and left Rushmore a day early and headed for the Badlands. Traveling east on Hwy 90 towards the Badlands we stopped in Wall, SD at famous Wall Drug located in the middle of nowhere, coined as the “World’s Largest Drug Store” which is the #1 Roadside Attraction in America. There are signs for it everywhere!! It’s been around since 1931 and has evolved in to 76,000 sq ft of attractions to include a 520 seat restaurant. It was during the depression that the wife of the pharmacist came up with the idea to offer free ice water to the weary travels coming across the plains before they had to close the doors of their little pharmacy…it caught on and the rest is history. The pharmacy is actually small but the rest is like one big emporium of many buildings offering almost any kind of souvenir one could possibly think of! On a summer day it draws as many as 20,000 people! We piled in there just like the rest of the curious travelers to include a parade of tour buses, RVs, bikers and cars. Oh well, we are tourists you know!! Wall is actually on one end of the 27 mile SD240 loop that meanders through the extraordinary formations known as the Badlands, located in the southwestern part of SD and about 80 miles from Mount Rushmore. The park consists of nearly 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires blended with the largest, protected mixed grass prairie in the U.S. It is the bottom of the sea that once was when the Earth’s climate was warmer and stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and from western Iowa to western Wyoming. It covered a region we call the Great Plains. The park contains the world’s richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds dating 23 to 35 million years old. It is very hard to explain what we saw and even somewhat harder to capture it in photos. There is so much history here and the landscapes compose only the starkest elements of nature. They speak to the fundamentals of our planet, Wind, Rock and Sky. It is desolation at its truest. It is vast, and seemingly timeless. It is a study in erosion since erosion is at an inch every year. We stayed at the Badlands/White River KOA which was very peaceful on 31 acres with 650 mature trees to include the cottonwoods that were exploding sending their soft white cotton like balls falling in the gentle winds over the campgrounds. We enjoyed our short stay there as did the boys...they just LOVED running wild in the fields!

Mount Rushmore 6-17 June 2010

We landed at the Palmer Gulch & Mt Rushmore KOA just outside of Hill City, SD in the heart of the Black Hills on the 6th of June. This KOA is what’s called a most complete resort and boy it has just about everything including 10,000 or more kids running around! It has 500 RV and tent sites, 55 Kamping Kabins, 30 mountain cabins, 6 executive lodges, a 62 room lodge with a 2-story fireplace in the lobby, a restaurant & lounge, gift shop and store, a pancake tent, and 18 different activities to include trail rides (horses are right there on the property), chuck wagon dinners, fishing pond, ATV & bike & car rentals, shuttle service to the monument, several different eating places, wine and coffee bar, and much, much more for the kids! And did I mention 10,000 kids all running in high gear from morning till quiet time!!! I must say we were impressed with the management of all of this…nothing was left undone and everyone was very helpful. However, we were used to more of a quiet, serene and visually appealing type of RV Resort...needless to say, we managed to get through it while visiting the special sights around us.
The first visit was to the evening lighting ceremony at Mt Rushmore which lasted about 90 minutes. The mountain carving features the 60 foot faces of four of our great American presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Work on the sculpture began in 1927 when sculptor Gutzon Borglum was 60 with work ending just after his death. He wrote “let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breath a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away” There is a Borglum visitor center and a Museum along with the avenue of the state flags leading up to the amphitheater. The "show" consists of a naration of a lot of history provided by one of the park rangers and at the end before the designated boy scout troup of the country brings down the flag, they asked that all serving or prior military service members come on the stage to be part of the ceremony. We decided that the women needed to be represented so down we hiked the many steps to the stage of the amphitheater. We have had to stand in many places to honor veterans and those currently serving, but we were taken aback by the enormous crowd giving us a very long standing ovation, clapping of hands and hollering for more than five minutes. We were in tears especially when one of the men said it was great to see some women represented. We noted through all of our travels in the mid west; these folk seem to be much more patriotic than most.
Crazy Horse Monument is the fifth granite face in the Black Hills which is still in progress being kept going by the sculptors’family (Korczak Ziolkowski). Work was started in 1948 which was requested by the Lakota Indian tribe as a tribute to Native Americans and when complete will be the world’s largest mountain carving, standing some 563 feet high and 641 feet long. Crazy Horse said “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”He defended his people and their way of life in the only manner he knew after the 1858 treaty, which had stated that the Black Hills of Dakota will forever be the sacred land of the Sioux Indians, was broken. He was stabbed in the back by an American soldier while at Ft Robinson, Nebraska under a flag of truce in 1877. There is also a large orientation center and the Native American Educational and Cultural Center, as well as the sculptor’s studio-home and workshop with a lot of his pieces of work on display along the many gifts presented to him and his wife who now oversees the enterprise along with a part of their 10 children. Some of these gifts are pictured here, like the motorcycle and stage coach. They have refused to accept any Government funding for this project so it may take at least another 40 years for the sculpture to be completed.
We visited a museum in the town of Hill City, which was the nearest to our camp site, called the Museum of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research which is a small business, yet their produced specimens are seen in museums and other venues throughout the world. They are an innovator in fossil preparation techniques. This is where STAN T REX is usually housed but was on loan to another museum. They have dozens of other dinosaurs, fossil fishes, reptiles, mammals, birds, plants and the most incredible collection of invertebrates in the region, along with local and world-wide meteorites, agates and mineral specimens. It was all very interesting and we took some photos for your viewing pleasure. Maybe you already knew but it was actually a surprise to us that South Dakota is so well known for its fossils...hadn't a clue before we got here! Learned interesting tidbits about "Sue", the largest T-Rex find to date which has quite a bit of controversy surrounding it. Apparently one of the curators at this institute actually found "her" on nearby land where the "owner" said it would be ok for the instutite to excavate and take her. Another landowner said it wasn't the original owner's land and it went to court only to find out that it wasn't either party's land...it was government land. Anyway Sue ended up being auctioned with the winner being the Field Museum in Chicago. This little Institute must have been heartbroken after all the work they put into getting her "out" of her graveyard...
We have to admit, we went through quite a bit of rain during our stay in the black hills. That didn't stop us though. One day we drove through Custer State Park which covers 71,000 acres in the Black Hills and also stopped to have dinner in the town of Custer at this old bank turned into a restuarant. Excellent steaks and it was fun knowing we were in a building with such a long history...late 1800s :-). As can be guessed, both the town and State Park are named for ole George A. Custer who in addition to leading that death charge, also led a "secret" army expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold, which of course, was discovered. Custer Park is home to the nearly 1,500 free roaming buffalo. There are several road trips one can take through the park and the one we were most impressed with was Needles Highway. The name comes from the slender granite peaks that characterize the area. It is 14 miles of hairpin curves and narrow granite tunnels and the beautiful Sylvan Lake. There is one section called the Cathedral Spires, a series of pinnacles that resemble church spires and a granite formation that looks like the eye of a needle. There is also the Wildlife Loop in which you might see some mule deer, elk, prairie dogs, wild turkeys and pronghorns...which of course, we did see! Then there is Iron Mountain Road which in the beginning they said it couldn’t be built…but the Governor, Peter Norbeck didn’t listen; he himself mapped it out on foot and on horseback. It is now called the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway and leads from Custer State Park to Mount Rushmore and along the way three granite tunnels frame Mount Rushmore perfectly in the distance. It has been named one of the ten Most Outstanding Byways in America. It really captures the splendor of these ancient mountains. We loved all of it and took a lot of photos as you will see...don't miss ole George's profile on some of the "rock" shots...You also might notice dead looking trees and piles of wood called tree stands stacked very neatly on the forest floor. This area has had serious beetle problems wherein the beetles attack from inside the tree, sucking the life out of it...don't even know the tree is infected until it's dead...apparently the stands isolate the beetles to those stacks where they basically starve to death...don't ask us how that happens...anyway, we also learned out to identify ponderosa pines...they are literally red (rosa) on one side (the side that gets sun). They are quite pretty and plentiful in this area. maybe you'll be able to pick some of them out. We hope so.There was a rainy day that Debra decided she wanted to go to Wind Cave National Park which is 132 miles of known underground passages and 28,295 acres of above ground wilderness and wildlife. It is the fourth largest cave in the world. She went on a ranger guided tour while I visited the gift shop and stayed with the dogs. She said afterward that she was glad I hadn’t gone because I definitely would have been claustrophobic. Especially after imagining what it must have been like when they first discovered this cave and how DARK it would have been! This cave was not as colorful as others we’d seen but it did have unusual rock formations, to include what is called “box work”. Bet you can pick it out…Afterward, we had lunch in a great little town called Hot Springs in a local restaurant…It being a Sunday, it was packed and we sat with several folk who were also traveling and one family who lived there. We had a great time talking with them and it was a huge meal for a very small price…liked that! Although plenty of rain on this leg, we both enjoyed this part of the country and looked forward to our next stop...the Badlands...

Ride to Mount Rushmore 6 June 2010

Following the hatchery, we made a short stop in Deadwood,SD; a historic mining camp, built on a rowdy history of gold, gambling and gunpowder. It was the American Frontier, turbulent and on the move. Where Wild Bill Hickok met his violent end with a bullet to the back of the head at Saloon #10...Now it is home to 86 gambling halls, hotels, and the Mt Moriah Cemetery where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried. Ahhhh...true love...she died many years later with her final wish requesting to be buried next to Wild Bill...wonder how her husband felt about THAT?!And miracles of miracles...we made it out of town without gambling any!!! Another short stop was the Chapel in the Hills in Rapid City, SD built in 1969 and an exact replica of the famous 850 year old Borgund “Stavkirke” (Stave) Church located near Laerdal, Norway. It is beautiful from every angle and the construction techniques were as the early church builders had in choosing the timbers with each being hand cut. Imagine...16,000 shingles being hand cut with a saw! The ceiling is constructed like a Viking ship turned upside down. The front door is a carving of snakes and dragons, the battle between good and evil. As pagans, the dragon was good luck to the Vikings. The front door is known as the men’s door and the side door known as the women’s door. In the early church, men stood on one side and women and children stood on the other. Hopefully you will be able to see the beauty from our photos. While driving around the Rapid City area, we passed through Sturgis which is home to the largest bikers rally with over 155,000 bikers attending every year and even more expected this year in August for the 70th anniversary!! Just can’t imagine…thank God it's not August!

Spearfish Canyon and DC Booth Hatchery

From Devils Tower, we stopped at a stop you may be surprised about but not one that we have not done before in other parts of the country! We visited the historic D.C. Booth Fish Hatchery in Spearfish, SD, one of the West’s oldest fish hatcheries which was established by the Government in 1896 and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Today, it serves as a living fisheries museum and still has the original Booth house, a furnished, circa 1905 residence on the National Registry of Historic Places, along with many artifacts. The hatchery was created to propagate, stock, and establish trout populations in the Black Hills of SD and Wyoming. It was surprising to learn that trout were not native to SD and WY and in the beginning they had a “fish car” that was utilized to deliver fish stock. The train is still on the property and it was interesting to see and hear all the stories from the volunteers at the park. You could see “lunker trout” in the viewing room and also see all the tanks of the trout from baby on up. It was really a nice museum and park to visit before heading on to Mount Rushmore.