North Dakota Bound

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We left Fernandina Beach on April 29, 2009 on a five month adventure that will have us spending a month in the Northwestern Corner of North Dakota, two months in Southern Idaho, and then back to Virginia for about a month. We won’t be home again until early October. Our first stop is Arlington, VA, where we’ll spend a few days visiting with our son, John, his wife Kemper, and two of our wonderful grandchildren Mary and Robert. We had a great visit. The highlights were the elementary school fair, Robert’s baseball game, Mary’s soccer game, and a nice visit with Kemper’s parents, who came over for dinner on our last night in Arlington.
We began our westward trek on May 4, slogging our way across the Appalachian Mountains to Parkersburg, WV, our first overnight stop. We are due in North Dakota May 12, so we don’t have a lot of time for sightseeing, but we’ll slip in a few stops here and there. Our first will be tomorrow at the U S Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio.
After a brief visit and lunch with my nephew, Dave Renz in Wilmington, OH, we rolled into Dayton about 2:30 PM, only 2 ½ hours before the museum closed. This is the biggest collection of military aircraft in the country, and since we are both pilots, we were eager to see some of the exhibits, but 2 ½ hours is not enough to even scratch the surface. Looks like we’ll have to make another visit someday. We were able to see a very interesting exhibit of presidential aircraft. We went on board several, including Eisenhower’s Lockheed Constellation and the Boeing 707 used by Presidents Kennedy through Nixon. This was the plane that took John Kennedy to Dallas in November 1963, and brought his body back to Washington. It was also on this plane that Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office. It was an eerie and sobering feeling to be standing right on the spot where LBJ was sworn in, and to see where some of the interior walls had been cut away so they could get the casket through the cabin doorway. We also saw a few other historical aircraft, including the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the spy plane that holds the speed and altitude records. When the aircraft was retired in 1990, one was flown from California to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, setting a coast-to-coast record time of 64 minutes. Well, next time we will allot 2 days rather than 2 hours to see the museum.
Pushing on, we crossed the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Mo, boyhood home of Samuel Clemens, and decided to stop for the night at a Corps of Engineers campground on Mark Twain Lake, just south of town. We went into town to look around, but did not run into Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. We did enjoy the riverfront park, and watched a huge tugboat herd a group of large barges through the locks by the dam.
After overnight stops in Ames, Iowa and Mitchell, SD, we finally made it into North Dakota, and stopped for the night at Jamestown, ND. Jamestown is home to the National Buffalo Museum, the “world’s largest buffalo” ( a 46’ x 26’ statue), and White Cloud, a very rare albino bison. Also in Jamestown, we saw some of the flooding we had been hearing about before we left Florida. Sandbags were in evidence all around town, and the James River was still over its banks at several points in town.
Two hundred miles northwest of Jamestown, up near the Canadian Border, lies our destination, Lewis and Clark State Park. The park is on the banks of the Missouri River, which has been dammed up to form a long narrow lake that stretches diagonally across most of the northwestern part of the state. We were a day ahead of schedule, so we decided to stop for the night at Fort Stevenson State Park on the eastern end of the same lake. We finally arrived at Lewis & Clark S/P on the afternoon of May 12. This will be our home base for the next month. More about the park later.

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