Here is a high-level summary of my 85 day journey around 40 of our United States (including the 19 I had not previously visited).  Or, as I sometimes thought of it, activities to keep me busy in between looking for men’s rooms and gas stations.  This is in addition to my daily blog – markstrip.home.blog.

My three main goals were to:

1.  Return in one piece
2. Visit as many places as I could
3. Identify areas to which Rachel and I may visit for longer periods of time

I believe I met these goals.

During the trip, I did not lose my car, keys, cell phone, wallet, credit cards, driver’s license, eyeglasses or suitcases.  I did not get into any accidents, did not receive any speeding or parking tickets and did not jaywalk (excuse me, did not get any tickets for jaywalking).  I believe I deserve some kind of cognitive function award from the AARP.

I need to publicly thank my 2017 Island Blue Subaru Impreza, my trusty and reliable companion throughout my odyssey.  It travelled 22,635 miles over interstates, two lane highways, dirt paths and many narrow, winding roads through national parks, mountain passes and deserts.  It faced some snow, rain and fog – though thankfully not too much of any of them.  It was refreshed along the way only by one car wash and two oil changes.  It almost made it cleanly the entire way, but just 11 days before the end it suffered a flat tire as I was leaving Kent State University – perhaps caused by a leftover bullet from the National Guard in 1970.  It got rewarded the day after returning from the road by another car wash and a thorough interior cleaning by the detailing folks at a Natick Mall garage, before being pressed right back into service to carry Dan, Rachel and me, along with our three bicycles to Martha’s Vineyard.

Another big shout-out goes to the American Automobile Association (AAA).  When I did get the flat tire, the AAA representative on the phone was familiar with Kent, Ohio and sent me to a Firestone store just a mile away, so that I could get new tires quickly and be on my way.  But much more important was the complete set of AAA state Tour Books I used to plan the trip.  I always utilized those books while travelling in the 1970’s and 1980’s but I wondered if they even still had them in this age of the Internet.  When I called the Framingham AAA office, they told me they had them all right in their office and I went down to get them.  I planned my route around national parks, presidential homes/libraries and a good-sized list of sites I had been writing down over the past year or so.  The AAA Tour Books show a certain number of starred top attractions in each state and that helped me fill up my itinerary with hundreds of interesting stops.

Writing my blog every night in my hotel was also a highlight of my trip.  I usually pretty much worked out the narrative (including my editorial comments) in my head during the day.  The time-consuming part was picking out the 10 or 12 pictures among the 100+ plus I snapped each day.  As for the song of the day, I compiled a list of songs before I started the trip, often involving some time on Google looking for tunes about, say, Montana.  But I came up with a different or additional song about one-third of the time as a result of my visits.  And speaking of music, the fully-loaded iPod Dan gave me kept me awake throughout all my driving, as I made it through the whole alphabetical list of albums, with a few on the second time around.

You’ve been waiting patiently.  I have compiled a list of my 12 favorite things on the trip, split into four categories:

HISTORY DAYS (2)

History was always my favorite subject in school and I visited a vast number of museums and sites on both national and local history everywhere I went.  I had two particularly favorite history days early in the trip.

Civil War – Gettysburg Battlefield and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

The Virginia Historical Triangle – Jamestown and Yorktown

NATIONAL PARKS (4) – out of the 20 that I visited, all of which I enjoyed:

Arches – Bryce Canyon – Yosemite – Glacier

STANDALONE STOPS (3)

Hoover Dam – I was fascinated by the creativity and the cooperation of both the politicians and the engineers to get this massive project done ahead of schedule and under budget.

The Oregon Coast – spectacular views of rushing water, rocky cliffs and massive cedar trees just out of sight of the ocean.  And add in Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, the Lewis and Clark exhibit at Fort Clatsop and the Route 20 sign in Newport, telling me how far I had gone and how much further I needed to go to get home.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – a showcase of the soundtrack of our lives.  My favorite half hour of the entire trip was watching the American Bandstand film clips of dozens of our most well-known performers singing and being interviewed by Dick Clark.

RECURRING SUBJECTS (3)

Civil Rights museums and sites – Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, Jackson, Memphis, Little Rock, Tulsa and Cincinnati (the National Underground Railroad Center for Justice).  It was good to see comprehensive and thoughtful presentations of our past problems.  It just makes it that much sadder to know that many of these problems still haven’t been solved.

Music – Clarksdale, Mississippi (Blues) – Memphis (Soul and Rhythm ‘N’ Blues) – Nashville (Country) – Detroit (Motown) – Cleveland (all of the above genres – and then some)

The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery – Harpers Ferry, St. Louis, Fort Clatsop Oregon, Pompey’s Pillar Montana and Yankton South Dakota.  This was one of the most important events in the early history of the United States.  Although the Louisiana Purchase had just doubled the size of the country with the areas along the Mississippi River and the Great Plains, the whole Rocky Mountain area and Pacific Northwest were up for grabs between the United States, Britain and even Russia.  And the journey itself into the almost completely unknown was amazing.

Now we move to the essay part of my report.  If I were writing a detailed book about my journey (which I’m not, unless someone pays me a big advance), I have a working title:

     America – the Beautiful, the Stolen, the Resourceful and the Generous

THE BEAUTIFUL

This is a great-looking country and I’m glad I got to see so much of it in person.  The 48 contiguous states have land area similar to Europe, Canada, China, Brazil and Australia, but I suspect more diverse terrain and features than all of them.  The mountains, canyons, plains, deserts, lakes, rivers and coastlines are amazing.

THE STOLEN

A couple of years ago, I read an op-ed, and I can’t remember the writer, so you can accuse me of plagiarism.  It attributed a large portion of the United States’s historically great economic production to two thefts – stealing the land from the indigenous peoples and stealing over two centuries of labor from African slaves.  I certainly saw much evidence of this in my travels.  The latter, from the list of civil rights sites above – in particular, the Underground Railroad Museum, which laid out in great detail the history of the slave trade in North America, going all the way back to the first group of slaves sold by Portuguese traders in Jamestown Virginia in 1619.  The story of European and later United States appropriation of the ancestral lands of our first inhabitants also started in Jamestown.  I followed this thread throughout my travels – the French and Indian War and conflicting loyalties during the Revolutionary War; the Trail of Tears as native tribes were sent west of the Mississippi once the new United States expanded beyond the Appalachians; the further relocation of most of the tribes to Oklahoma Territory when the Homestead Act made the land in the Great Plains valuable; and finally the discovery of gold in the only remaining sovereign native land (the Black Hills of South Dakota), which led to Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee and Indian reservations and boarding schools for native children where their culture and language was forbidden.

THE RESOURCEFUL – NATURAL RESOURCES AND GREAT INVENTIVENESS

The land of the United States certainly was blessed with abundant natural resources – salt, coal, iron ore, natural gas, oil, the fertile soil of the Great Plains, gold, silver, copper, uranium, borax and all kinds of other minerals.  And the American people quickly learned how to use all these for economic advantage.

And here is a partial list of the great ideas invented or further developed by the ingenious and entrepreneurial minds of our countrymen and women:

Steamship – Cotton Gin – Canals (like the Erie) – Railroad – Mechanical Farming – Mining – Anesthesia (at Mass. General Hospital) – Telegraph – Electricity – Telephone – Phonograph – Automobiles – Assembly Lines – Airplanes – Radios – Radar – Nuclear Power (for better or worse) – Television – Space Exploration (including that moon landing we’ll be commemorating next month) – Everything related to computers, the world wide web, the internet, smart phones and artificial intelligence.

THE GENEROUS

In the last hundred years as the most powerful nation on earth, the United States has been generous in supporting democracy around the world.  Entering World War I helped end the stalemate on the Western Front.  The United States supported Great Britain’s solo stand against Nazi Germany through the Lend-Lease program in 1940-1941 and then of course joined World War II after Pearl Harbor and turned the tide in Europe with the D-Day invasion of 75 years ago.  Then after the War, the Marshall Plan enabled war-ravaged Europe to rebuild itself and NATO and the United Nations managed to end the first Cold War.

But you know from reading my blog that I witnessed the benefits of great things that our government has done to improve our lives over our history.  Again, I’ll list them: 

Public Education (starting with my two alma maters, Boston Latin School and Harvard) – Land-grant Colleges and Universities – Homestead Act (not so good for the native peoples, but good for settlers heading west for economic opportunity and independence) – Transcontinental Railroad – National Parks – Canals and Dams – all the building done by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the New Deal – Social Security and Medicare – The GI Bill for Education and Low-cost Housing Loans after World War II – The Interstate Highway System.

Individually and collectively, the people and government of the United States of America have done amazing things in the last nearly 250 years.  I remain confident that we have many more wonders in our future.

This is my 85th and final daily blog for my trip around most of the United States. Paraphrasing JK Rowling’s dedication of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, I credit you, my blog followers, if you have stuck with me until the very end. This exercise gave me something to look forward to every night- and helped me to see the bigger picture and themes.

I had three good stops today on my way back from Acadia. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens on Booth Bay is the only such gardens in the state – Maine’s climate isn’t the best for flowers. It’s a beautiful place to walk around. The Children’s Garden features props and plants for many picture books written by Maine authors, such as “Blueberries for Sal” by Robert McCloskey of “Make Way for Ducklings” fame. And read the story in one of my pictures on how this place came to be. A group of nature lovers planned it for years, found the right land, put up all their own houses as collateral and built it. It seems their faith has paid off – there were over 100 cars in the parking lot on a Monday morning.

The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath consists of most of the actual buildings from the Percy and Small Shipyard at the time Bath was one of the leading builders of wooden sailboats and schooners in the world 100 plus years ago. There were many other nautical exhibits, on lobster fishing, lighthouses and American sea trade with the Caribbean islands. Then we took a cruise on the wide Kennebec River, seeing where it flows toward the Atlantic Ocean, a couple of lighthouses that are still shedding light and the Bath Iron Works that is still building destroyers for the US Navy.

A couple of weeks ago Daniel got us free tickets for a program at 7:00 tonight

at Boston’s PBS television WGBH on an upcoming 6 hour series next month on the 50th annivety of the first moon landing. They showed a few historical clips – President Kennedy inspecting the Saturn rocket with Werner Von Braun and the next day making his famous “We go to the moon” speech; also emotional footage of Frank Borman’s wife and other astronauts’ wives and children nervously watching the TV coverage of Apollo 8, the first time in history men left the earth’s atmosphere.

I am glad I got to see the familiar skyline of my hometown Boston as I dashed in from Maine to make this program. I have spent the last 12 weeks exploring this amazing country. All the work and innovation required to travel to the moon is one of the most amazing things our country has ever done. My fervent hope is that the United States of America still has some amazing thing still ahead of it!

Mark Seliber – Natick Massachusetts – 3 June 2019

I have two good coming home songs.

“Home At Last” by Steely Dan. I didn’t fight in the Trojan War or take 20 years to get back, but I did have a hell of an Odyssey.

“Home Again” from Tapestry. I could argue that Carole King is up there with Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers and Paul McCartney as the greatest pop melody writers of the 20th century. This is a simple yet beautiful song. “Now I’m home again and feeling right”.

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Once I set the dates for my trip and knew I was heading south first, the last full day of my trip would be my first ever visit to Acadia National Park. A wealthy Bostonian George Dorr purchased the land and donated it to the federal government. It became the first Eastern National Park in 1919, one hundred years ago. The park shares Mount Desert Island with the town of Bar Harbor (no “r’s” required to pronounce!).

I got off to a slow start. The visitor center is closed and I couldn’t get the handy park brochure (later when I picked one up at a nature center, I learned that the visitor center has been in the process of being updated since the fall and is supposed to open this month). Also, it was extremely foggy in the morning – when I drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain, the highest point within sight of the Atlantic Ocean on the entire Eastern seaboard, I could see nothing.

I went for a nice hike around Jordan Pond, the sun came out and a return trip to Cadillac yielded a full panorama of views – the town, the little islands in the harbor, Eagle Lake, hills and rock formations with climbers. I walked on Sand Beach and hiked the Ocean Trail to Otter Point along the rocky coast of Maine that brought back fond memories of my day on the Oregon coast 6 weeks ago. I ended the day with a halibut dinner with an ocean view.

The song of the day is “Acadia Waltz”, written by a local group Kelly Farm in honor of the centennial of the only national park in New England. And a bonus song, the Beatles’ “The Night Before”, since this is the night before I finally return home!

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I started this trip in early March and here it is June as I make my way through northern New England.

In Burlington, I visited the grave sites of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen and his brother Ira, who founded the University of Vermont, whose campus I explored. Then I went to the lively waterfront and looked across Lake Champlain back to New York where I had been.

Then I saw my first familiar faces in quite some time. Christine Pepe sang with Rachel in the quartet With Spirit Sing in New York. She and her husband Chuck built log cabins and started a lodging business called The Muddy Moose in Morrisville (just north of Stowe) 7 years ago. Rachel, Daniel and I stayed there for a weekend that first year and we’re overdue for another visit.

My very first stop back on March 11th was at Calvin Coolidge’s library in Northampton Mass. But Plymouth Notch Vermont was the tiny village that raised a future president. All next to each other and restored are his mother’s house, the one room schoolhouse whose teacher later became Coolidge’s stepmother after his mother died young, the general store his father ran, the tiny house Coolidge was born in and the larger house across the street where the family lived and where his father swore him in as president after Warren Harding died. Calvin got his laconic wit from his father – when he was asked how he knew that he, a notary public, could administer the oath of office, John Coolidge replied “I didnt know that I couldn’t”.

I went through the White Mountains National Forest along the Kancamagus Highway for the first time in many years. Its rushing rivers, waterfalls, and views of forests and mountains compared favorably with many of the sights I have seen along the way. And I ended up the day in Augusta Maine, poised to visit Acadia National Park.

My feelings for my voyage are summed up well in a favorite poem, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and a favorite song, “We May Never Pass This Way Again” by Seals and Crofts.

I planned this trip meticulously and stayed every night where I had originally intended. Still, I switched some stops from one day to the next and discovered some additional places that turned out to be among my favorites.

“Yet knowing how way leads on to way – I doubted if I should ever come back. – Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by – And that has made all the difference.”

The song tells us to be daring and try new things and also to savor each moment as if it’s the last. Along the way, I often thought but never had the heart to say to locals I encountered “This is the one and only day of my life I will be in Oklahoma”. But I truly enjoyed seeing all that I saw and doing all that I did.

“Like Columbus in the olden days – We must gather all our courage – Sail our ships out on the open seas – Cast away our fears and all the years will come and go – and take us up, always up – We may never pass this way again.”

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My knees and replaced left hip didn’t think that the most strenuous stretch of the whole trip would be on day 82. Whiteface Mountain is the site of the downhill ski race at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics. There’s a 5 mile drive to near the top. You park there for a “nature trail” to the chilly weather observatory at the very top. This nature trail is a couple of hundred stone stairs interspersed with rock climbing. Thank goodness for the railings. And the spectacular views of the surrounding lakes, forests and mountains were worth it.

Then I visited the Olympic training center, which was full of exhibits and young girls preparing for a rhythmic gymnastics competition in the huge gym. The Winter Olympics Museum is attached to the hockey and figure skating rinks from the 1932 and 1980 (Miracle on Ice) games and overlooks the site of the outdoor oval which hosted the Opening and Closing ceremonies and speed skating.

The Adirondack Experience is my kind of place to visit – indoor exhibits and galleries, furnished actual and replica buildings and people to explain logging, boating and transportation to the area. It’s the story of how the Adirondacks were lived in by the native peoples, settled by the Europeans and Americans and used for wood, mining, boating and fishing, luxury “camping” and now recreation. And there were plenty of Adirondack chairs!

A very exciting event was crossing a bridge over an inlet of Lake Champlain and finally arriving back in New England. It was opening night of the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival and I watched a few bands playing at three stages along the pedestrian Church Street.

The song of the day is “The Sound of Music”, since I am near the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe and I heard a lot of music tonight. And a song for the whole trip is “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce, the one I miss the most of all the musicians who died too young. I have been following the words of his refrain: “Rolling me down the highway, Rolling me down the highway, Rolling ahead so life won’t pass me by”.

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Way back near the beginning of my trip, I had a Civil War day (Gettysburg and Harpers Ferry) and then a day in Yorktown and Jamestown. Today I was immersed in two important earlier battles in the Revolutionary War, Ticonderoga and Sarasota.

The French first built Fort Carillon to defend the Portage area between Lake Champlain and Lake George. The British took it over during the French and Indian War and renamed it Ticonderoga, a native word that means “land between the waters”. Then in May 1775, a month after the battles of Lexington and Concord, Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured the fort on behalf of the continental army and that winter moved many of the fort’s cannons all the way to Dorchester Heights in South Boston, persuading the British garrison to evacuate Boston March 17, 1776. In June 1777, as part of the British army’s strategy to control all of New York and separate New England from the rest of the colonies, general John Burgoyne took back Fort Ticonderoga.

That’s the fort’s military history. Its preservation history will reach 200 years next year. A member of the Pell family of Rhode Island (ancestor of Senator Pell of Pell Grants renown) bought the property from the US government in 1820. Restoration finally started in 1909 and has been ongoing ever since. The barracks can be seen and there are exhibits on all three floors of two sides of the fort – one side has been completely modernized as a 21st century museum.

In September 1777, three months after recapturing Ticonderoga, General Burgoyne was leading the British army down the Hudson River to control the whole valley and meet up with General Howe’s troops who were occupying New York City. The continental army, led by Generals Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold, set up their troops on a hill in Sararoga overlooking a narrow piece of land next to the Hudson that the British would have to pass through. There was one battle on September 19th where the Redcoats took the field but couldn’t proceed through the bottleneck. Both sides regrouped and fought the decisive battle on October 7th. The Americans prevailed, the British retreated but were surrounded and General Burgoyne laid down his sword – according to the film at the visitor center the first time ever that a British army surrendered on the battlefield. This decisive victory gave George Washington and the Continental Congress the confidence needed to persevere until Yorktown 4 years later.

There is a driving tour of the battlefield with 10 stops, including many monuments and a restoration of a farmhouse used as one of the continental army’s headquarters. And I saw a group of folks on an archeological dig, searching for more clues of what happened 242 years ago.

I also visited the intact house of American General Philip Schuyler (whose daughters became famous in “Hamilton”), drove along the western shore of the very scenic and touristy Lake George and ended the day seeing the hockey arena and the outdoor speedskating oval from the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.

There are two songs of the day. For Saratoga, “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon and for the Miracle on Ice “Miracle of Miracles” from “Fiddler on the Roof”.

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I was a boy from Syracuse most of today. I will review a few places I visited to learn about history of the region and then focus on one of those spots on the trip to which I was really looking forward.

First I walked around the campus of Syracuse University, where a lot of people I know and a lot of sports announcers I have heard attended. The main quad had a lot of interesting older brick and stone buildings. Then I remembered that Rachel’s cousin Mike and his wife Amy grew up on the same street in Syracuse (and met years later around Boston). Mike and I texted and spoke briefly and I sent him a picture of his old house.

The Erie Canal may be the most important factor in New York City becoming the largest port and business center in the country. The Erie Canal Museum shows that it was built between 1818 and 1825 and like the Hoover Dam it was completed a year early and under budget. It enabled food to be transported from the midwest to New York through the the Great Lakes, the Canal and the Hudson River (and manufactured goods were transported in the other direction). It was paid for and then some by tolls and the museum includes the only remaining counthouse (aka tollbooth) in the country and a replica canal boat to board.

The Onendoga History Museum showed how salt that was found on the shores of Lake Onendoga was the first big product in Syracuse but Syracuse’s central location on the canal really drove its growth in industry and banking (somebody had to hold to all that toll money!).

Down the thruway in Rome is Fort Stanwix. This was always a busy and strategic place because before the canal, boats and their

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cargo had to be carried between the end of the Mohawk River and the waters heading west. The British built the fort for the French and Indian War. Then the American rebels took it over and won a key battle during the Revolutionary War. The fort was also the site of the final land agreement between the victorious Americans and six Native American nations. The whole fort was torn down and the National Park Service has been restoring it in recent years.

The Safe Haven Refugee Camp at Fort Ontario in the town of Oswego was the one and only instance where the US government helped save European Jews during WWII. When FDR received clear evidence of the Nazi concentration camps, he created the War Refugee Board. They found a displaced persons camp in Southern Italy in 1944 and selected just under 1,000 refugees (mostly intact families) to take a troop ship and live in the recently decommissiond fort on the shores of Lake Ontatio. They were quarantined for a month and in the familiar position of being inside a fence. But the townspeople were very welcoming and the refugees got involved in all kinds of activities, both within the camp and in town. A few teenagers who arrived knowing no English in 1944 received New York Regents high school diplomas in 1945. But the refugees had one more crisis to face. When they left Italy, they signed papers acknowledging they might be sent back to their home country after the War. But they had assimilated so well in Oswego and in most cases had no real home to which to return. With strong advocating by their New York Congressman and the refugees themselves, President Truman allowed them to go a few miles to the Canadian border and step back as immigrants on a path to citizenship. The Safe Haven museum shows a film from some years ago with interviews with the former refugees, who of course went on to do amazing things as Anericans. It’s a wonderful story. Too bad there weren’t 6,000 more stories like this in the United States and other allies countries.

The song of the day is “(15 miles on the) Erie Canal” on Bruce Springsteen’s “Dublin” live album, that I swear came up on my iPod while driving this afternoon. And the Broadway musical of the day is “The Boys from Syracuse”, based on a Shakespeare play that takes place in Syracuse … Sicily.

I spent the morning in Buffalo and the afternoon in Rochester as I continued my tour of upstate New York.

Buffalo’s City Hall has an outdoor observation deck on the 28th floor. Unfortunately it was pouring rain and the glass partitions had raindrops all over them so my pictures are streaky – you can see one. Then I visited the house where Teddy Roosevelt was sworn in as president after William McKinley was assassinated while attending the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. We listened to actual audio of the proceedings. Then I went to the Buffalo History Museum, in the only building still standing from the 1901 Fair. There is a room devoted to favorite son Tim Russert, longtime host of Meet the Press.

George Eastman invented the process of developing film from a camera away from the location where the photo was taken. Then he started the company that made a fortune doing the development. He came up with the name Kodak because he liked the letter K, so Eastman Kodak was born. He travelled all around the world expanding the business, never married, built a mansion and a photography museum which I toured today and donated huge sums of his money to the University of Rochester Medical, Dental and Musical Schools; a place with the acronym MIT and all kinds of buildings and parks.

Cross town is another, less fancy house of someone else who stayed single. After all, Susan B. Anthony was much too busy advocating abolition with Frederick Douglass, temperance from drinking and of course her life work of granting women the right to own and inherit property, attend colleges, gain custody of their children and – oh yes – vote. I learned that she traveled constantly around the world, gave an annual address to a joint session of Congress and was arrested and convicted of voting in the 1872 presidential election. Her last speech, at age 86, was like Martin Luther King’s last speech in Memphis – she told her fellow suffragettes that she wouldn’t get to vote but that they would get to the promised land. And they did in 1920.

The song of the day is Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” in honor of George Eastman.

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I drove a lot today (upstate New York is big) and enjoyed the three stops I made.

First was Steamtown National Historic Park in Scranton, on the site of the huge railyard of the former Delaware, Lockawanna and Western freight and passenger railroad. There were plenty of trains but more interesting was the history of this railroad and the railroad way of life in America over the last nearly 200 years. The coal discovered and mined in Pennsylvania provided the iron and steel to build the railroads, the steam heat to power them and the cargo for them to transport. Not surprisingly, the railroads owned the coal companies, until Teddy Roosevelt broke them apart.

The National Comedy Center is in Jamestown NY (south of Buffalo) because Lucille Ball was born there and already had a museum. But the Center would be famous if it were in a big city. It really is a hoot. The hook is you get a wrist band with a bar code and you start out by using it to set up your profile – a screen asks you for your favorite comedy films, sitcoms, standup comics and overall comedy stars. Then you swipe your wristband when you play interactive or trivia games. And when you get to the TV or movie sections, clips and narratives will be shown customized to your interests (I was usually the only one at each station, but if there were others, they would come up with a consensus program). And any place that has a whole section on George Carlin with some of his voluminous files of developing his word plays is worth the trip!

It was already early evening when I arrived at Letchworth State Park, the unheralded “Grand Canyon of the East (or at least of the Genesee River)”. You will see pictures of the spectacular waterfalls and canyon walls.

Today’s song is the Grateful Dead singing “Truckin’ (up to Buffalo)”.

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I made my way through central and northeastern Pennsylvania today in varied weather and surroundings.

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I completed my tour of 6 universities of the Big 10 sports conference (there are now 14 – apparently counting doesn’t count in big-time college slports). I have seen Wisconsin, Michigan State, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio State and today Penn State. I strolled through an arboretum and the main quad in the old part of campus. In my periodic comments on important government projects, I have focused on the 20th century (the CCC, the GI bill and the interstate highway system). But while Lincoln was busy fighting the Civil War and emancipating the slaves, he also found time to authorize the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Act and these land-grant state colleges and universities that educate most young Americans outside the Greater Boston area.

I went on a wildlife tour at Penn’s Cave (which also has boat rides into caves) and saw several interesting animals. I drove in a downpour through a few Amish villages where I had to maneuver around many horse-drawn carriages that were really getting wet.

Then, believe it or not, I took a tour of the longest continuously used anthracite coal mine in the world (1855 to 1972). I got a better understanding of how coal mining actually works but it still seems like hard and dangerous work that nobody really should be doing.

I concluded the day with a glimpse of the Poconos and the Delaware Water Gap, where I hiked to the bottom and the top of a real cool waterfall.

I’ve got two related songs for today. There’s “Working in a Coal Mine” by Lee Dorsey. Then listen to or read very carefully the lyrics to the song “Allentown” (I was near there today). Billy Joel figured out in 1982 why Donald Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016.