In 1973 we left our new home in our new car with our new baby and our new tent and traveled for a month. Our first stop was in Utah where we visited my cousin Ilene and her family for a few days. The farthest east I’d been, up to that time, was Cardston Canada and I’d only been to 8 states. This trip added 9 more to my list. When we drove through Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado, the scenery we could see was beautiful but as we climbed higher the sky got grayer. First it started raining, then snowing. Fortunately it didn't stick too much so we were able to keep traveling. I promised myself that I’d return other than in June so I could really see the mountains. We finally did that in 2001 on another of our long trips. When we camped in Limon Colorado we enjoyed watching the thunderstorm over the mountains in the distance. Soon the storm was upon us and we got into our tent. Then our tent blew over so I took Trina and ran to the restroom. The storm didn’t last long but our sleeping bags were soaked and our tent was down so we spent the night in the laundry room at the campground. We used that tent for a lot of years afterward and laughed at its crooked poles. As we drove across Colorado and into Kansas I looked back and it seemed that I would never see the mountains again. They were so far away. The prairie was a lot more rolling hills than I had expected and it was beautiful in its own right but I missed the mountains. We went to Missouri and enjoyed seeing the church sites there. At the campground there I saw my first fireflies. We stopped in Hannibal and saw the Mark Twain sites there. Then we went to Nauvoo and saw the sites that were rebuilt at that time. There weren’t near as many as there are today. The streets had all been covered with gravel because they had just filmed the movie Huck Finn (or was it Tom Sawyer).
We drove north to Wisconsin but I didn’t know where to look for my ancestral roots. We stayed with Frank’s Aunt Julia in LaCrosse and visited lots of his other relatives. His Great Aunt Eleanor had a picnic for us in her backyard. We learned a lot about Frank’s family history on that trip. We took a side trip to Madison to visit Frank’s Aunt Eldiva and Uncle Wally. We took a boat ride at the Wisconsin Dells on our way eastward. We left Wisconsin after 10 days and headed home across Minnesota. We saw the Badlands and the Black Hills in South Dakota and went through Yellowstone and the Tetons. Then back down through Utah, stopping to visit some friends in Kaysville. We arrived home tired and happy after our month of touring. Quite an undertaking for a young couple with an 8-month-old baby and no air conditioning. Frank used to tease me about all the baby spoons I’d lost along the way.
All ready to go.
Dinosaur National Monument Utah
Trina on top of the world.
Wind Cave National Park South Dakota
Mt. Rushmore
Setting up the tent in Yellowstone
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