Great San Francisco Trip 2013-Day 11-Churchill

Day 11  Wednesday July 31
A very simple and pleasing day.  We drove from St. Louis to Kansas City with a most interesting stop at Fulton, MO to visit the Winston Churchill museum.  He first used the phrase "Iron Curtain" in a speech he gave at the college in 1946.  It was cloudy and threatening until the last hour of our drive.  Now we have a clear sky, reasonable humidity, and low 70's.  We plan to visit several sites here tomorrow.

The Great San Francisco Trip 2013-Day 10-Ernie Pyle

Day 10 Tuesday July 30
Today our daughter Beth and her husband Ken are flying to Miami on their way to Peru to hike to Machu Pichu in celebration of their 25th wedding anniversary.  We had a good night's sleep and then learned at the local library that my great-great-great Uncle Urias is buried in a tiny family plot a half mile back in the woods.  We postponed looking for his grave and headed to St. Louis where we are spending the night.  Had a great shrimp meal at El Mezon, a local Mexican chain.  It rained hard much of the day, but we had a pleasant stop at the Illinois Capitol building from 1836 to 1839 which is in Vandalia.  Abraham Lincoln was a representative from Sangamore County who helped to pass the law moving the Capitol to Springfield.  It was special to walk on floors that he and Stephen Douglas both walked on.  We are done looking for graves for a few weeks.  After an interlude in Kansas City, we will focus on National Park sites for two weeks.
I neglected to mention that we stopped at an Ernie Pyle Memorial near his hometown of Dana, Indiana.

The Great San Francisco Trip 2013-Day 9-Uncle Urias, Crawfordsville, IN

Day 9  Monday July 29
Last year when we drove to Iowa for our granddaughter's wedding, the crops looked awful.  They were burnt up.  This year a few need rain, and a few have had too much rain, and a few were planted very late, but most of the corn and beans look really good.  It does an Iowan good to drive through so many flourishing fields.  That is what we did all day.  With, of course, three stops to look for graves.  Not finding Urias Hardesty in Crawfordsville, Indiana we spent the night in a local KOA.  A quiet and pleasant setting.

The Great San Francisco Trip 2013-Day 8-Bonecutter Reunion

Day 8  Sunday July 28

Another cool day.  Attended worship in Auburn.  All of the men in the congregation came forward to sing a hymn since the scheduled singer was ill.  They sounded very good.  I did not join them lest I detract from their fine effort.  We joined 50 Bonecutters for a reunion at the United Methodist Church in Auburn.  It was good to see three of my mother's first cousins aged 85, 90, and 99.  Those in attendance were chiefly their descendants.  We won a candle for having come the furthest.  Then we made our daily cemetery pilgrimage to four cemeteries and found almost every grave we were looking for.  I am pretty well over my cold, but Judy's keeps hanging on.

The Great San Francisco Trip-Day 7-Waterloo, IN

Day 7  Saturday July 27th
Cooler and windy as we spent a quiet morning washing clothes before heading to the Waterloo, Indiana cemetery.  My parents both grew up in Waterloo.  My mother, my brother Dave and I lived here  her mother from 1944 to 1946 while my dad was serving as a chaplain with the Navy in the Pacific.  We lived in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, but every two years we would come to Waterloo for the Wing and Bonecutter reunions.  We found many graves here and two in Butler, Indiana before heading to Hamilton for a pleasant evening with nine of my first cousins and their families.

The Great Trip to San Francisco 2013-Day 6-Icer Cemetery

Day 6  Friday July 26
Breaking up camp is a slow process, but we are not in a hurry.  Heading to a motel in Auburn, Indiana we have time to visit the Ice Cemetery (I kid you not; it's named for a local family named Ice) and seven others including the one in Ney, Ohio where I left our suitcase on our trip west last summer.  You had better believe that Judy is paying attention every time I open the trunk.   The weather is favorable, but we need to attend two reunions in the next two days and prefer the ease of a motel to dressing in the tent.  Earlier we had encountered a fellow who is in to geocaching , and he showed us how to enter co-ordinates into our GPS.  There is a website Find a Grave which gives the coordinates for virtually every cemetery in the US.  This has been a great help when touring the back roads of Ohio.  I'm making progress on my cold.  Judy has ups and downs.  Auburn, Indiana has done a great job with flowers on their downtown streets.

The Great Trip to San Francisco 2013-Day 5-Corn Canyons & Cemeteries

Day 5  Thursday July 25
Making progress on our colds, but they do not give up easily.  The weather is gorgeous.  Ohio has made most of its farm roads hard surface even if they are one lane roads.  So we spend all day zipping through oceans of corn and beans and an occasional wheat or tomato field.  The corn is looking great and towers over us.  It is like being in a corn canyon.  We visited small family cemeteries all around Putnam County including one where we had to use the farmer's lane by which he accesses the corn field next to the cemetery.  Had an excellent meal at the Red Pig In in Ottawa before returning to our tent and using earplugs for a most welcome and refreshing sleep.  We found many, many graves of my ancestors on several sides.

The Great Trip to San Francisco 2013-Day 4-Cemeteries

Day 4  Wednesday July 24
Judy slept well and starts to feel better.  But now Bill starts in with the runny nose and aching eyes.
However we have a great day visiting cemeteries in Mansfield, Shelby, Bucyrus, and Marion Ohio.  These were all big enough to have offices where every one was very gracious and helpful in locating the graves we wished to visit.  The lady in Mansfield even copied their obituaries for us!  We ended up in Bluffton, Ohio at a KOA where we were the only tenters.  The location was lovely, but the truck traffic on I-75 created a constant roar which it was hard to ignore in the tent. We had a really good Mexican dinner in Bluffton where the streets are lined with an abundance of flowers.  It is a most attractive small town.  The weather is idyllic.

The Great Trip to San Francisco 2013-Day 3-Iiams Graves

Day 3  Tuesday July 23
Judy's cold was still problematic.  So she rested while we drove to Mansfield, Ohio where we again opted for a motel.  We did make stops at two Morrow County cemeteries to locate more of my relatives.  Incidentally Stan Primmer grew up in Morrow County.  At the West Point Cemetery the grave of my IIams' ancestors was covered with a massive bramble bush.  I'm still trying to figure out why that was allowed to happen.

The Great San Francisco Trip 2013 Day 2 Auburn/ Seneca Falls

Day 2  Monday July 22
Judy was not only a bit weary from the bullfrog chorus, but she came down with a serious summer cold.  We persevered on our journey with stops in Auburn to visit Harriet Tubman's grave, Seneca Falls to find the National Historical Park to commemorate the first Women's Rights Convention has been greatly improved, and Mt. Washington visit the grave of my great-great-great-greatgrandparents.  Serious torrential rain cancelled our camping plans.  Judy's cold also dictated that  we spend a night in a motel.

The Great Trip to San Francisco 2013 Day 1. Little France

Day 1  Sunday July 21.  We crammed the Corolla full, covered the piles in the backseat with a sleeping bag and headed west.  After a brief stop in Johnstown, NY for lunch with our son-in-law Greg Truckenmiller and his three sons (daughter Rachel was on her way to Austin for a conference), we reached Oswego County in time to visit three cemeteries.  Judy especially likes to visit the cemetery in Little France.  It is a charming spot.  She is probably related to two thirds of the persons buried here.  Here lie her great-great-great grandparents Francois and Jeanne Piquet, who were illiterate and ended up with a tombstone that reads "Piggy".  It was beautiful day weatherwise, and our campsite at Oneida Shores campground was all we might wish for  - except that the bullfrogs made sleep difficult.  Our tent was just right, and all our equipment worked well.