Home, A Look Back 1

We are home after an exciting and enjoyable trip across the country.  The more you see of this country, the more you are thankful that you live here and can enjoy the natural beauty but just getting in your car and taking a road trip.  And what a road trip it was.  Sixty-eight hundred miles and twenty-seven days of superb vista’s, some never seen by us before.

It started with a trip to Lewiston, Idaho to spend an evening with cousins.  We had dinner and caught up on the families and tried to figure out how all of us figured into the family tree.  We left the next day to head to Montana and make the cross-state trip to North Dakota landing in Dickenson for a couple of days.  Our primary purpose for going the North Dakota was to investigate further my grandmother’s family on my dad’s side of the family.  We had some information about homesteads and their locations within Dunn County.  We visited my great-grandmother and grandfather’s graves in the Dunn County Cemetery.  Spending time looking at some of the landscape that they dealt with and thinking about all the things they didn’t have when they arrived in the late 1800’s.  

My grandmother was one of four daughters.  She left North Dakota and ended up in Seattle, Washington where our family is rooted.  The other three daughters were granted homestead patents in 1914.  These were the pieces of property that we were able to find.  At the time, I had the location of my great grandfather’s property but I had miss placed it.  Still, we had an opportunity to imagine what it must have been like to live there in their time and place in history.

Cousin, center front and her family.

Food poisoning attacked me during our last day in Dickerson but we still left to go down to Watertown, South Dakota to visit my 95-year-old cousin, daughter of one of those sisters mentioned above.  She is an amazing woman and her daughter, grand-daughter and family take very good care of her.  Even though she is in an assisted living facility, she spends time with family and friends.  Unfortunately, I was still feeling the effects of my very uncomfortable experience in Dickerson and we only had one short, early evening meeting that did include a fantastic dinner put together by the family.  We left the following day, sad that we weren’t able to stay longer but, Ken, in his need to plan, had already made a reservation for a hotel and an evening stay in Kansas City before heading further south to visit another cousin in Lebanon, Missouri.

More on that visit and other things along our road trip will be upcoming.  Hope all is well.