Favorite Historic Sites. Christine Johnson

I have a confession to make. I love historical markers and monuments, especially those big placards that tell what happened to make a site important. I’ve been known to veer off the highway when I see one.

Summer is the time of year when I break out my Passport (to the U.S. National Parks) and set off in search of history.

 

At every U.S. national park (or monument) visitor center, I stamp the passport as proof I visited that site. The oldest stamp in my passport is from ten years ago. Do any of you have a National Parks passport?

 

 

 

Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas is one of my favorites. This pre-Civil War era fort guarded the Straits of Florida and famously housed Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who was convicted for treating John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln.

 

It's also way out to sea, 70 miles from Key West, and thus one of the more difficult parks to get to. The islands are called the Dry Tortugas because there's no fresh water. Drinking water was a huge issue there!

 



Last summer I visited North Carolina’s Outer Banks and Kitty Hawk where the memorial to the Wright brothers’ first flight is located. After studying aviation history for my first novel, Soaring Home, I drank in the windswept dunes and reproduction of their plane.

 

This summer, I went to Glacier National Park in Montana, the setting for my third book, All Roads Lead Home. In fact, I just got back home yesterday. Those mountains in the background are on the continental divide. Whenever I’m there, I think of the settlers and trappers and explorers who passed through and the peoples for whom this has long been home. Those people had fortitude!

 

Have you visited any historic sites lately? What’s your favorite? I’m always looking for new and exciting places to visit.

 

Happy trails,

Christine Johnson

The Marriage Barter (May 2013)
Website: http://christineelizabethjohnson.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ChristineJohnsonAuthor
Twitter: @ChristineJWrite

 

Road Trip

This is Merrillee ready to tell you about a road trip I took before cell phones were in wide use. What does a road trip have to do with heroes? Here is my story. Back in the early 90's (that's 1990's) when we lived near Boston, I took a cross-country road trip with my two teenage daughters. Here's a photo of a vehicle very similar to the one I drove.

My husband would fly to join us when we reached Spokane, Washington, where one of my brothers lives. (What was I thinking?) I wanted to show my girls some of the sights in our wonderful country and parts of Canada. During our month-long trip, we visited four national parks and saw several national monuments besides a myriad of other sights that are too numerous to mention. Here are some of these places.


The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota


The Badlands National Park in the western part of South Dakota


Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota


Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument

As we drove along route 212 in Montana toward the Little Big Horn Battlefield the minivan started to shimmy, and then one of the back tires blew. I had a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, Montana. You can see from the photo above that there isn't much out there except grass and a few trees. I could change a tire, couldn't I? After all, I was a modern woman. So I got out the jack and started the process while cars I had passed earlier went whizzing by. When I was finding it difficult to lower the spare tire from its perch beneath the minivan, two families of migrant farm workers stopped. The two gentlemen pulled out their heavy duty jack and had my tire changed in five minutes. My heroes! That trip took place nearly twenty years ago, but I still remember how thankful I was for those two men who changed my tire.


Part of the rain forest in Olympic National Park


Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC, Canada


Mount Rainier National Park


Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park


Here is Mount Spokane. The day we arrived in Spokane the temperature was 106 degrees F. When we returned a week later after a whirlwind tour of the western part of Washington State and parts of British Columbia, Canada, it snowed on Mount Spokane.

We saw a lot a fabulous sights on this trip, and besides the heroes that changed my tire, this trip reminds me of all the men and women who heroically crossed this nation in covered wagons and faced dangers of all sorts to settle our country from coast to coast.

Please share with us the story of a road trip you have taken.