Travels with Tom

The following is taken from the blog Tom keeps for his family:

I spent the last week traveling to and from John's graduation in Santa Fe. [John is the youngest of Tom and Helen's four kids.]

John did his part, which was to graduate. As he came down the aisle, I said "Congratulations, John ..." and he countered with "Thanks for dropping a hundred and sixty grand ..." to the amusement of the other parents, who laughed, knowing that they all had dropped a hundred and sixty grand, too.

I drove out because I wanted to see the country from the ground for once. I've flown, I think, over every square foot of the country at one time or another on business, but I hadn't experienced it as you can do driving.

The trip was three days out, three days in Santa Fe, two days back....

I took the northern route through Minnesota, South Dakota and Wyoming along I-90 and then down the eastern side of the Rockies along I-25.

I spent Monday driving across the high plains, sometimes called the grasslands.

The grasslands of western high plains are something else. Early descriptions of the grasslands speak of an "ocean" of grass, and I understand, now, why. The distances are immense, and signs of settlement sparse. It is possible to see all the way to the horizon at points without seeing any sign of human habitation or a single tree. No wonder settlers from the east became disoriented....

Tuesday was tourist day.

I spent an hour and a half in the Badlands... I spent the rest of the day working my way through the Black Hills, the Laramie range and southeastern Wyoming, headed to Fort Collins, Colorado.

I didn't think much of the Black Hills, frankly. The Black Hills, for all the mystery surrounding them, "aren't much", as my mother-ex-law might say ... [Tom's mother-ex-law is a native Texan, as is his former wife, actually. Helen didn't grow up in Texas, but Mrs. Anastaplo still has a touch of Texas in her speech.]

Custer State Park, though, was interesting. Custer State Park is south of the Black Hills and has a road through a buffalo range. The road is posted with warnings to stay in your car -- buffalo are dangerous -- and pay attention -- buffalo have no compunction about standing in the middle of the road, knowing that if you hit them, you'll lose. I saw a lot of buffalo, some of them a few feet off the road....

The drive Wednesday down I-25, through the Fort Collins, Denver and Colorado Springs corridor, was a grind. Colorado is not a state I'd recommend. The corridor along the eastern Rockies has overgrown its infrastructure. I-25 is a long traffic jam, and the road isn't kept in decent repair.

Past Colorado Springs, though, things improved, and northern New Mexico was wonderful, as it had always been. I wandered down to Santa Fe through the Sangre de Cristo range, and it is much as it was fifteen years ago, when I vacationed there for a week....

I spent my time in Santa Fe attending to family -- dinner with John, a shopping day with Peter and his girlfriend, Liz, visiting with Helen and her husband Jay, and catching up with Helen's sister Teddy and her husband, David. [Teddy and David live in Austin. More Texans...] All of this was interspersed with John's graduation, and getting him packed up for the summer.

... [I skip over Tom's negative evaluation of Santa Fe.]

The mountains, though, are as beautiful as ever. I walked up into the Santa Fe Natonal Forest in back of St. John's College, and took in the view, high above the city itself. It was worth the three miles of hiking....

I started back Sunday morning, in what can best be described as a marathon, driving I-40 across northern New Mexico, the Texas panhandle, and Oklahoma to I-35, where I headed north to Wichita, and then up through Kansas and Iowa to US 20, and back into Wisconsin at Dubuque.... I came back into Wisconsin along US 151 to Dodgeville, and then up STH 23 through Frank Lloyd Wright country to Reedsburg, where I met Michael for dinner, and it is as gorgeous as always.

As Dorothy said, "Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas any more ..."

John Steinbeck noted, in Travels with Charlie, that Wisconsin was the prettiest state in the Union. Nothing spectacular, mind you, but pleasing to the eye. Thanks be to God.