Touchdown...arrived in Schnecksville this afternoon.  I have no pictures for today, it was just driving.  As I left West Virginia the big "Welcome to Pennsylvania" sign looked strange to me, could I really be in Pennsylvania?  The roads became familiar...as did the speeding drivers.  For the most part in the western states, drivers would drive the speed limit, of course, on some of the roads it was 80 mph but no one was zipping by me.  In Pennsylvania the speed limit was 65 unless I was in one of the MANY work areas and yet I felt like I would be run over if I didn't go faster.  Work areas were 55 or 45...you don't dare do the speed limit or you might get hit in the rear.

What was best?  From a scenery and driving experience the 4 wheel drive down into Echo Park at the Dinosaur National Monument was exciting and fun.  New Jeep, dirt road, high canyon walls, petroglyphs and caves...what's not to like.  From a meeting people point of view, it was great to stop in and visit with my radio restoration friend and his wife and I loved meeting the people of Sistersville WV.  I never had a bad people experience during the entire trip.  Folks at the various museums and tourist stops were all chatty and helpful, both site workers and other tourists. I had a fellow sitting next to me at dinner one night and we got to chatting.  He was a race driver (dirt modified I think he said) and he restored racing cars in addition to being a photographer.  He showed me pictures and I showed him my restored radio photos...it was a pleasant evening.

The only "bad" thing to happen was somewhere in Kansas where my gas cap is lying at the side of the road.  I had bought a locking cap, but unfortunately it did not have a tie that connects it to the car body like the OEM cap has.  At one of the gas stops I must have left it on my bumper and driven off.  Fortunately I had the OEM cap with me so no big deal.

In the eastern half of the country the horizon is only as far away as the next stand of trees, houses or buildings for much of the time.  Traveling along the Ohio River was a nice change and very scenic but still, an eastern view in my mind.  In Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, even Kansas, the horizon is most often very distant and whether its mountains in the distance or just the end of a long flat expanse you get a sense of the true vastness of the open space in the West.  I did not tire of looking at it...well maybe a little in the flats of Kansas but its so different from the East. 

One friend asked me to comment on how the reality of the trip measured up to the original thoughts of taking the trip.  While the concept of the trip was never a very detailed vision, I have to say that the reality of the scenery zipping by the window, radio playing, wind blowing through the little hair I have left, seeing sights that I don't normally see and meeting people along the way that were interesting did, indeed,  measure up very nicely.  I'm glad I made the trip; I would do it again. 

Thanks for taking this trip with me...
Cheers
Bob

Fog seems to be prevalent around the Ohio River...more this morning but not too bad.  You can see it hovering above the river and low areas on the river banks.  On the drive up the river I came to Friendly WV and the Mail Pouch Tobacco sign on the side of this barn.  I used to see these signs on barns all the time when we would drive out to the mid-west to visit relatives when I was a kid but I haven't seen one in many years.  It called for a picture!  It makes sense that I would find one here since the company was based in Wheeling WV and I believe Mail Pouch is still being sold.

The stop today was in Sistersville WV, a town founded by my 4th great grandfather Charles Wells who gave the land for the town to two of his daughters Delilah and Sarah.  It was a town that was booming in the late 1800s when oil was being pumped from the yards of many of the residents.  It has a much reduced population and number of businesses these days.  The Wells family cemetery is located just behind the Sistersville General Hospital and has recently been given a face lift by other descendants of the Wells clan.

It was just a little foggy, and thus gave a slightly spooky tone to the visit.  This cemetery is just above the river and according to my grandfather, Friend Wells Jr., it has on occasion been flooded.

I wanted to visit the Sistersville Museum, but it did not open today until 1:00PM so I had time to kill.  I walked around the town and stopped in at the Emporium where I met Terry Wiley the owner.  We chatted quite a bit and it turns out he is transplanted from Cincinnati among other places and owns the Gas Light Theater and several other properties.  He also started the Sistersville Museum, about 10 years ago or so if I recall correctly, and is trying to grow and organize it.  

As I walked around town I happened upon a fellow who was digging out the foundation of the house next to the library and I stopped to chat.  He was very friendly and we chatted for about half an hour.  Believe it or not, he relocated from the wine country north of San Francisco CA just last April.  He's restoring the house.  When I stopped at the library, to kill off a little more time, the person there was similarly very friendly and telling me about the library and how they are now scanning the negatives that they have in their collection, just as we are doing at the Bandon Historical Society Museum.

There were 3 ladies in the museum ready to answer questions and tell stories so I did have a nice visit but they did not allow photos inside the museum.  

Another spot in town to visit was the Wells Inn, which was started by another relative, Ephraim Wells.  For many years it was a very good Inn and restaurant but has been having trouble for a number of years.  It no longer is an inn but is now a boarding house run by a fellow from New York.   Sadly, you can not even enter the building unless you are a resident.  

The last leg of the trip starts tomorrow morning.  The "Welcome to Pennsylvania" sign as I crossed from WV to PA looked strange to me, could it really be Pennsylvania....

Route: https://goo.gl/maps/1sHqtXpay6D2

I'll do one more post following this one to reflect on the trip and post any pics of the final leg.  

Fog was the order of the day this morning, very thick so I waited a bit to get going.  It lifted where I was but I did hit a few patches first thing in the morning.  Eventually it all burned off and it was a lovely sunny day.  The trees are starting to turn but nothing spectacular yet.  First stop was at the Serpent Mound site.  The second photo is at the tail end of the "serpent" looking up the hill with the observation tower in the background. 

The following two photos are from the top of the tower looking down at the serpent.  First the view of the tail and second the view of the rest of the body and head.

The people who created these are still unknown for certain although they are most surely one of the various native cultures that were known to be located in this area.  There are also some mounds that are circular and look like bumps in the ground 10 feet high or so and maybe 20-30 feet in diameter which were burial sites.  Various cultures over time actually continued to bury folks in these mounds.

On to the Parkersburg WV where I visited the Oil and Gas Museum.  The museum is a vast collection of artifacts from the oil booms in West Virginia, the businesses related to the boom, as well as quite a bit of Parkersburg city artifacts.  They are labeled to some extent but mostly just there to be viewed.  Lots of old photos, oil patch maps and business records too. 

Among their collection, a set of oil bottles that Frank of American Pickers would drool over and a visible gas tank that Mike would love:

The price on the pump is 12 and 1/2 cents for gas!
A couple examples of the other items in the museum:

Getting pretty close to home now.  One more stop at Sistersville WV where some of my ancestors lived and an overnight just outside of Pittsburgh
https://goo.gl/maps/dVpFKrht2bq

Another cloudy day for the drive.  Just down the road from where I was staying was the Dubois County Museum.  Another very large building and lots of local artifacts covering all aspects of the area including more dangerous animals.  In this case a very large polar bear that one of the locals apparently shot while on a hunt in the Arctic someplace.  I don't recall the history on the buffalo.

I particularly liked this huckster wagon used for selling merchandise to the rural & towns folk...a mobile Walmart!

They had taken this log cabin apart piece by piece and rebuilt it inside the museum!  This is where one of the museum volunteers cornered me and started telling me the story about knowing a lady that grew up in this house and that it was actually more modernized at the point they had taken it apart.  The interior had plaster and looked more like a modern house, but they took it back to its original look when they rebuilt it.

Here's a small part of the collection...

While going through Louisville KY I stopped at the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory and took the tour.  They take you into the actual factory and the workers are there making bats while the tour guides tell you about it.  Up until 1980 or so they were hand turning the bats on a lathe, then they got a set of lathes that followed a pattern mechanically and today they use modern CNC computer controlled lathes.  They have a number of "historic" bats used by famous ball players in famous situations...but to be honest...they are all just bats to me.  They did have Babe Ruth's famous 60 home run bat that the Babe had notched for every home run.

I met Ted Williams while he was kissing his bat....

Arriving at the hotel in Paris KY, I found a mate for my jeep!

Getting pretty close to home now, only about 500 miles away.  Heading into Ohio toward WV and PA tomorrow.
https://goo.gl/maps/Hu5RSo6zhir

It was cloudy with rain sprinkles all day.  I stopped at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center which told the story of the formation of the group, their travels and troubles and their return.  There were many quotes from the diaries so you could get the information directly from the participants.  Hard to imagine traveling from St. Louis area to the Pacific and back, all through unknown territory.

 From there I headed toward Centralia IL where there was an Historical Society Museum.
It was a larger building than I expected, 3 floors of exhibits very much in the style of the Bandon Historical Society's Museum.  The museum contained artifacts and memorabilia from the town's history including their former doctors,

...the local disaster...

....local gas station artifacts....

....and miscellaneous other artifacts...

The highlight though was chatting with a local author, former detective and DEA undercover agent Rich Simer who was hawking his book, Diary of a Detective, Small town...Big Secrets  the museum lobby.  I don't think his book will be a best seller (yes, I bought a copy) but he was an interesting character.  Here's a picture of him along with the beat up Philco radio that they had on display.

The real highlight for the day was visiting with Ron and Debbie Ramirez.  Ron is founder of the Philco Phorum and author of Philco Radio 1928-1942, the definitive book on Philco radios.  The radios you see in the photo are Ron's collection of rare Philco Tropics radios, made only for export and difficult to find.

Tomorrow I'll stop at the Dubois County Musuem and the Louisville Slugger Museum with Paris KY as the end of the day stop.
Route: https://goo.gl/maps/oXn9wr8hDps

Rain this morning and for the first two hours of the drive to Jefferson City, MO.  The tour of the Missouri Penitentiary started at 10AM  and if I missed it, the next was at 1PM.  Fortunately I got there about 20 minutes early so all was well.  Our tour guide was a former guard from the prison so his knowledge of the later years was to some extent first hand.  The prison was first built in 1836, the oldest prison and for a long time the only prison in the west.  It was fascinating and depressing.  The early philosophy of the prison was to make your time so miserable you would not want to ever come back so conditions were terrible, inhumane even.

No buildings from 1836 exist but one from 1868 was still in use when the prison closed in 2004.  It housed the prisoners who were the best behaved and thus had a better existence.

They have stripped the lead based paint from all the walls but did not repaint it so it actually looks a bit worse than it did when they closed it down.  Having said that, the cells were very small and at times during the prison's history contained as many as 8 to 10 inmates.  Each cell had a bucket of water and a bucket to use as a toilet.  The metal slat door is an original door from 1868, these were replaced in later years with bars and toilets and sinks were added.  Since it was a facility for the good prisoners they were allowed to buy things like TVs and radios, paint their cells and make curtains.

In the basement area, there were showers for the prisoners but those showers, installed in the later 1900s were in the area where the dungeon cells were.  The cells were still present behind the walls for the showers and accessible through a doorway.  We went back into them.  The cell size was about the same as the ones above ground but after the door was closed and locked, all lights were out and you were in total darkness.  Again, there might be 6 or 8 people in the cell with you and your two buckets.  These cells were for the trouble makers.  I suspect most tried not to return but one poor fellow was there on and off for 5 years.  He went blind (apparently a side effect of no light for long periods of time).  I image many went mad as well.  Here's the cell, with the lights on:

James Earl Ray was in this prison, I don't recall the crime, and he devised a successful escape by hiding in the bakery boxes that left the prison to supply other local prisons.  Eleven months later, still on the lam from Missouri he shot Martin Luther King.  Eventually captured and sent to a different prison he died of liver disease.

This prison had the state's gas chamber which was used 40 times.  The chamber itself was made from a submarine to contain the cyanide gas that was generated to kill the prisoner.  Here's the walk way up to the building that contained the chamber.  

After the prison tour it was fate that the first "place to eat near me" search turned up:

They had a great grilled portobello mushroom salad.

Arriving at the hotel in Pontoon Beach IL, I somehow felt very safe with the police department just across the parking lot!

Tomorrow will be a drive to Ferdinand IN to visit with my Philco phriend Ron.

Route:  https://goo.gl/maps/irfpUR4SsGL2

I have to say that traveling the interstate highway is faster but a lot less interesting than local roads.  It was very windy for the better part of the day and I guess that's why the had the wind farm located along this stretch.  There were many many of these power generation windmills on the horizon.  You think the wind doesn't make much difference driving but I was averaging 19+ miles per gallon until this stretch and it went down to 16.2 miles per gallon!

I was simply making miles for the morning and then arrived in Independence MO.  (I'm not in Kansas any more Dorothy...but I did not see the yellow brick road either...)

First stop was the Harry Truman Presidential Library.  It was a great visit.  Harry certainly inherited a lot of things to make decisions about when FDR died.  The library is both a museum and a repository for his papers and personal artifacts.  I spent 2 to 3 hours walking through it and if you read everything and viewed all the films you could spend all day.  I even met Harry as he was campaigning from the back of a rail car on his whistle stop tour.

For my Philco phriends, in 1941, Harry and his wife Bess bought a Chrysler Windsor and the car had installed in it a Philco 800 radio.  

The above picture was in the display case in front of the Chrysler and I looked in the car and indeed there was a Philco 800 installed.  Here's a picture of one that is on ebay at the moment (asking $195), my apologies to the ebayer for using his photo but its the only one I could find.

When I pulled into my hotel and checked in after the visit to the Truman Library, I was followed in by a fire truck and ambulance.  Fortunately it must have been a false alarm as they left a few minutes later.

Tomorrow I make my way toward St. Louis stopping in Jefferson City to visit the Missouri State Penitentiary.  Its a tourist thing now with various tours including the opportunity to stay overnight!

Route:  https://goo.gl/maps/zkFaw92JR9S2

Leaving Denver the landscape quickly began to flatten out and the view was farm land, farm land, cattle ranch, farm land, wind farm, farm land, farm land, oil rig, farm land...you get the picture.  You just don't realize how much land there is out there being farmed or grazed. 

The museum in Kit Carson was closed...of course, but the Trading Post was open for a coffee and pit stop.

Having arrived in Hays KS, there were some museums I was going to see on Monday but apparently most museums in KS are closed on Mondays...sheesh....I could sit around for a day but I'd rather keep moving so I'm headed for Independence MO tomorrow, all on I 70. Then I'll visit the Truman Presidential Library in the afternoon...yes I checked the website, its open. 

Route: https://goo.gl/maps/QtChcAEBx362

With yesterday being a touring day, today was mostly driving.  I have come to the realization that 5 or 6 hours of driving is about my limit.  I could push it and do more but would not feel good about it.  At one of the "points of interest" I found the "homestead" home of Edwin Johnson, a Colorado state legislator, Lt. Gov., Governor, and US Senator.

Like most of these homesteads, there's not a whole lot of anything else around!

Craig CO had a Northwest Museum that I stopped and spent an hour or so at.  Very nice with free admission...although there is a huge donations box sitting right behind the visitor register!  I did meet a couple of desperados, Butch and Sundance...

and you had to be careful about the wildlife!

Lunch was at the Moose Cafe in Kemmerling CO.  I had a prime seat with the moose head right over my table!

I overheard some of the locals talking about driving to Kansas City from here and described the drive as Boring...that's the direction I'm headed....hmmm.

The scenery improved as I climbed the mountains toward Denver.  There were a number of areas where there was snow on the ground beside the road but all the roads were dry and clear.  

I stopped for the usual fuel up about a half hour out of Denver in a little town of Georgetown CO.  They had a nice visitor center and there was a Railroad Museum in town but I decided to keep driving.  The town is right in between two mountains.

Tomorrow I will head into Kansas with Hays KS as the destination.  Nothing special about Hays except that its about 5 hours from Denver. Route: https://goo.gl/maps/sVSnUQ75p4w