25-28 Aug: We left before the main breakfast on the last morning of the reunion to begin our long drive to Colorado, so Amy could arrive in time for the biennial rug hooking conference in Denver that she is attending and exhibiting in. That meant four straight days of driving, with little time to stop to sightsee along the way. We stayed at three campgrounds we had stayed in before, conveniently close to I-70 a day’s drive apart. At the first one, Hickory Run State Park in Indiana, we had time before dark for a short walk on a hiking trail through a scenic sandstone canyon.
On the second day, we stopped for lunch at Vandalia, which was the second capital of Illinois (before Springfield), where Abraham Lincoln served two terms as a state representative early in his career. The old statehouse is still there and now houses an Abraham Lincoln museum. Vandalia was also the western terminus of the National Road, which was built in the early 1800s to facilitate travel west from Cumberland, Md., to what was the “frontier” in those days.
We began our third day by stopping to read the excellent historical panels at a kiosk beside the Katy Trail State Park in Missouri. We had camped near the ruins of the roundhouse turntable at the site formerly known as Franklin Junction. Franklin was established in 1816 near the western frontier of the U.S., five years before Missouri became a state. In 1821, wagon traffic began from Franklin to Santa Fe, New Mexico, along what became the Santa Fe Trail—an important freight route until 1880, when a railroad finally reached Santa Fe. Our fourth day was all driving, and we arrived at our daughter Lowry’s in late afternoon for a fun reunion with our granddaughter Corwyn, who had just turned three a few days ago.
