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I had no idea what to expect from the day, but after a good dinner of Chipotle and a good rest, I felt like I was in a good head space. Hannah and I drove to Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  Turns out, there is a small visitor center down I-90, and we were surprised to see lots of horse trailers...and horses! I mean, if there is an iconic picture of Theodore Roosevelt in anyone's mind, it's on a horse.  We went into the "visitor's center" which isn't more than just restrooms and t-shirts, but holy smokes, what a collection of t-shirts! Whoever is the marketing director for this park deserves a raise because the center had so much great merch that I had a difficult time choosing just a magnet and a sticker...so I bought two t-shirts ;-) Hannah got her junior ranger packet, and we were off. We then drove another bit to the park.  I won't lie--I was a bit relieved to see a teeny tiny town right outside of the park.  It felt a bit like a western town in Disn...

Oh man.  I did so NOT feel well when I woke up the morning after our late-night Culver's dinner.  But the show must go on, right?  We had a couple of hours to head to Voyageurs National Park.  Never heard of it? Yeah, neither had I.  Turns out, it's mostly a water park where people fish in both the summer and winter, and the visitor center side of it focuses on the people who have used the water over the past couple of hundred years.  We had a canoe ranger tour scheduled where we would learn things for an hour on land  and then spend 30 minutes on the water .  About an hour before our scheduled tour, Hannah got a phone call (unbelievable in and of itself because we basically hadn't had any service for the past two days).  The tour was cancelled because of the rain and the water conditions on the lake.  Hannah was so disappointed.  We headed to the visitor center anyway. Bless the hearts of those rangers because they had set up the c...

Day two.  We woke up smelling stale urine, and I couldn't get it out of my nose most of the day.  However, that was really the only bad part of the day.  If I had to give a real title to the day, I would call it "Day Two--The Miracles of the Spirit of Elijah". And even writing about planning the day, I was inspired by the spirit. I had the feeling that I should leave time in the day for us to explore.  We were headed to the Keewenaw Peninsula, otherwise known as "copper country".  Probably 15 years ago, I found John's great-grandparents living there.  Aside from census records and their ship record, I had been unable to unearth anything else about them.  I'd been wanting to visit the area, because sometimes doing so, helps me "see" a family better. Before we left the hotel, I looked up the census record because I knew it contained their address.  For the 50 years I find them on census records, they lived on the same street and within ten addres...

Several months ago, Johannah and I decided that we would travel for the three weeks that she had off from PA school.  The first week we spent in Grand Cayman, diving.  The second week, aside from Glo and Hannah struggling through another bout with COVID, we watched the wild fires tearing through Oregon and Northern California, the exact destinations set for our third week.  Tuesday of week three, I called it--we weren't going to worry about skirting around wildfires and/or watching our plans go up in flames (!), so we cancelled everything. We needed a new plan. We talked about how we were going to get out to Utah, and Hannah suggested that we hit Gateway Arch on the way out.  Feeling the effects of climate change for the past several summers, I didn't relish the idea of going through St. Louis in August.  I asked her if there were parks further north that we could hit along the way, and she came through with a great idea. Instead of driving out I-80, or even I-9...