Recapping the Chicago Trip

The “Traveling Pasleys” were back on the road recently – sans trailer – in an unusual, 18-night, mid-winter foray to the snowy Midwest, frigid Chicagoland and the rainy Deep South that covered 4,023 miles and included stays in 11 different Holiday Inn Express Hotels. We missed the tornadoes in Alabama by less than a week; which is sort of too bad because I would have loved to get a bible signed by President Trump.

This trip may not sound very exotic - especially the part about HIEs - but one morning as I was gazing out the window and eating my “free” breakfast at an Illinois HIE a bald eagle flew by!

In addition to those HIE stays we spent one night with Dave’s cousin John Cline and his wife Julie in Overland Park, Kansas, two nights in Chicago with Tex and Rachel, two nights in Lexington, Kentucky with Rachel’s parents Mark and Mary Simon, and three nights in Knoxville for a second visit with Tex that included a tour of the federal courthouse where he works.

At the courthouse we sat in on a couple of hearings conducted by Tex’s boss (and Rachel’s former boss), U.S. District Judge Pamela Reeves and lunched with the Judge and her husband Charles (the director of the City of Knoxville Law Department).

Other trip highlights included:

• Transferring a truckload (literally) of furniture and books from our house to Tex and Rachel’s new condominium home in Chicago’s Uptown Neighborhood.
• Visits to 13 National Park Service sites.
• Stops at two Texas state historical sites (Sam Rayburn's home in Bonham and Dwight Eisenhower's birthplace in Denison).
• Visits to two great (but quite different) art museums (in Dallas and Knoxville). 
• At the DMA we saw an exhibit and attended a lecture on Georgia O’Keeffe’s little-known but very-talented younger sister Ida. 
• At the KMA a chance meeting got us an impromptu briefing on the museum’s history from two of its most significant benefactors.
• Visits to the venerable Field Museum in Chicago and the sobering new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

We also ate lots of good food along the way. 

Kaufman’s Jewish deli in the Chicago suburb of Skokie got high marks as did the steaks and spaghetti with meatballs at the Sand Trap Bar & Grill in Kansas City MO and the comfort food at the Corner Café in Liberty MO. Speaking of comfort food, hearty takeout meals from three different Cracker Barrels in Indiana and Alabama were happily consumed in hotel rooms. The shrimp and grits and pimento cheese in Lexington KY, the chicken and waffles in Knoxville TN and the seafood gumbo and shrimp etouffee in Lake Charles LA all deserve a shout out.   

Naturally, the trip was "sandwiched" between stops at two Texas Monthly Barbecue Top 50 perennials. Less than two hours into the trip we were eating brisket and pork ribs at Louie Mueller BBQ in Taylor and less than two hours before we got home we were eating brisket, pork ribs and sausage at the consistently excellent City Market in Luling.

Many thanks to John and Julie, Tex and Rachel, Mark and Mary, and Judge and Charles for your hospitality along the way.

Finally – because I know readers must be beside themselves with curiosity – I’ll do a quick and cursory review our NPS stats.

The 13 NPS site visits on this trip included three national monuments, three national military parks, three national historic sites, two national historical parks, one national battlefield and one national park.

My grand total is now up to 281 and Betsy is at 242 (there are currently 418 NPS Units and the list is growing and changing). Notably, we’ve both now been to every NPS site in 13 states: Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Now for some photo documentation of the trip. If you click on the first photo you should be able to view all of them in a slide show.

What a beautiful sight. Nine crates of books, five chairs and two tables are packed and ready to travel to their new home in Chicago!

The "discovery" of Ida O'Keeffe's paintings was, essentially, the result of a detective-like investigation by Dallas Museum of Art curator Sue Canterbury. After a chance observation of one of seven abstract paintings Ida had made of a Cape Cod lighthouse in 1931-32 Canterbury tracked down dozens of Ida's painting and, for the DMA, purchased an abstract painting of a Texas landscape that Ida made in San Antonio in 1938 when she was an art instructor at what was then known as Our Lady of the Lake College (now University). For more info about Ida O'Keeffe click here or here.

Check out these cool coasters featuring Ida's lighthouse paintings that we snagged at the DMA gift shop.

One of Canterbury's most significant discoveries was Ida's scrapbook. Included are several clippings from San Antonio newspapers in the 1930s.

The first of our 13 NPS site visits on this trip was the Fort Smith National Historic Site on the Arkansas River at the Arkansas-Oklahoma state line. The fort was built on the "western edge" of the American frontier to serve the adjacent Indian Territory (now known as Oklahoma). Over the years the fort transitioned from housing soldiers to serving as a federal court and federal penitentiary

Lock him up!

We had a great visit in Overland Park/Leawood/Kansas City with Dave's cousin John Cline and wife Julie; including a great meal at John's home-away-from-home, the Sand Trap Bar & Grill.

My Dad would no doubt have been quite pleased that we ventured out on a snowy day to visit the family grave sites at the Camden Point Cemetery.

Ah, home sweet home.

Speaking of homes. This was our first house, purchased in 1979 for -as I recall - a shade less than $50,000.

This is where I was sitting at the Rock Falls, IL HIE (the nicest hotel on the entire trip), eating my "free" breakfast, when the bald eagle flew by.

No problems getting a parking space in front of Rachel and Tex's condo. Their place is on the second floor on the right, directly over the top the truck in this photo.

The parents are in town checking out the new house...and Tex looks so relaxed.

Doesn't the table look great in Chicago? I'm not certain exactly how far back it goes in my family but I think at least to my great-grandparents. I can distinctly recall that my Dad had it refinished at a place in Platte City and the two of us went to pick it up in - of course - the funeral home panel van (that we used to haul flowers).

The beautifully refurbished Wilson CTA station on the Red Line is just two blocks from the condo.

And next to the new station (which is in the background of this photo) the old station has been restored to its 1923 glory and will be leased by the CTA to the Chicago Market, a community food co-op. Rachel and Tex are charter members of the co-op.

We took the train all the way out to Skokie, IL (as far north as the train goes) to eat lunch here at Kaufman's Jewish Deli...and it was well worth the trip.

Rachel said she likes pickled green tomatoes, but it sure doesn't look like it in this photo. By the way, in the lower right corner of the photo is my sandwich...known as the Happy Hanukkah. Basically it's mounds of pastrami with mustard piled between two potato pancakes. Almost as good as the cheese blintz!

Downtown Chicago, as seen from the steps of the Field Museum.

Sue, the museum's star attraction.

Scary!

Life imitates art, or is it the other way around? Either way, I wanted to do a more precise copy of the statue's pose but Betsy did not think it would be a very good idea.

Time to go. Goodbye Chicago, Tex, Rachel and Ginny. No promises, but this may be our last February visit.

In the 1840s slaves Dred and Harriet Scott filed lawsuits seeking their freedom (a plausible option because they had traveled with their owners - military officers - to states where slavery was prohibited). Two trials were held in this St. Louis Courthouse which is now part of the Gateway Arch National Park. The matter eventually percolated up to the U.S. Supreme Court where Chief Justice Roger Taney's ruling against the Scott's and in favor of their owners contributed to the start of the Civil War.

Speaking of the Gateway Arch, where is it? We wondered that when we parked the truck here on a foggy St. Louis morning.

A few hours later, we found it!

This enthusiastic, dedicated NPS ranger at the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park in Vincennes, IN is absolutely convinced that Vincennes would be in Canada today if Clark (older brother of William Clark, Meriwether Lewis's expedition partner) had not pulled off his daring raid on the British garrison here at Fort Sackville in 1779.

Tex hit the in-law jackpot with these two, Mark and Mary Simon (seen here in the beautifully-restored courthouse in downtown Lexington, KY).

Freddy was very polite and tolerated our visit to Lexington, sharing his sofa and chairs with few complaints.

We spent three days with Tex in Knoxville and gained a little appreciation for the place. Did you know that Knoxville hosted a World's Fair in 1982? The gold ball is a remnant of the fair.

How cool, we've got our very own lawyer!

Bell is looking forward to reuniting with her friend Ginny in Chicago in August.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened earlier this year in Montgomery, AL. Click here for more info. There is an excellent, modern, interactive museum in a building near downtown Montgomery that was once used as a slave auction house. But a mile or two from there, on a hill overlooking the city, is this memorial art work that strives to depict, remember and reflect on the phenomenon of lynching.

Between 1877 and 1950 approximately 4,400 African-Americans were lynched in the United States, mostly in the deep south but also in places like Minnesota and California. Each metal box depicts a county in the United States where at least one public lynching occurred. On each box the names of those lynched are cut into the metal along with the year it happened. Since the memorial was constructed more than 300 additional lynchings have been documented. If these additional lynchings occurred in a county that is not represented by a box the Memorial will add a new box. If the newly-documented lynching took place in a county that already has a box it will be replaced with a new box with the additional name(s) added. 

And then, finally, after 18 nights on the road, we were back home in Texas.