Picking Up The Pieces

As we sit in the van surveying the campgrounds I notice that the RV that had been next to us at last light had left during the night.  Their CAR was still there, but the RV was gone.  Took me a few minutes to figure it out:  they couldn't sleep for all the noise our collapsed tent made flapping in the hurricane winds!  They drove their bed someplace else for the rest of the night.  (I'm so embarrassed!)

Well, there's nothing left to do but pack things up and move on ourselves.

The wind had been so strong that it actually pulled up some of the tent stakes and broke the bungees Granpa had diligently (repeatedly) put in place.  No wonder the tent collapsed.  Nothing but a few bungees damaged though.  No worries.  Another experience for the backpack of life.

As we pull back out onto the road we see where we must have camped before.  Wyoming thought it was such a cool place that they turned it into a conference center.  I guess the muckiety-mucks get that sheltered-from-the-wind place and, if we ever camp at Curt Gowdy again, we get the hurricane...

The drive IS scenic though and ends in a nice surprise.

We intersect the Interstate at an interpretive rest area.  President Eisenhower authorized the Interstate highway's after having experienced Germany's autobahn, and this section must have been completed in 2009, the Sesquicentennial of Lincoln's birth - so they kinda dedicated "The Lincoln Highway" to both Eisenhower AND Lincoln.  (Did you know that every five miles the Interstate has to have one mile of straight road so that planes can land on them in time of war?  That's one of the major reasons Eisenhower wanted the Interstate built - easy troop movements.  It didn't hurt interstate commerce one bit either.)

And speaking of commerce...

The driving (no pun intended) force behind the completion of the Lincoln Highway was a man named Henry Bourne Joy.  He was the first president of the Lincoln Highway Association (1913), is sometimes called the father of America's modern highway system, and, oh, yeah, HE WAS THE PRESIDENT OF THE PACKARD MOTOR CAR COMPANY!  Hello!!  He convinced the government to take our tax dollars and build roads for his cars to drive on.  Pretty clever fellow, eh?  Don't get me wrong.  That's perfectly okay with me.  But without his "leadership," government might not  have built this road.  And what's the payback to me the taxpayer?  Tourist dollars support local economies all over America.  It was a win-win:  Joy made LOTS of money selling his Packards, and we have the "joy" of driving on the roads.

The old dirt roads slowly became paved and evolved into U.S. Highway 30 and then eventually into Interstate 80.

The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental automobile road - 3,500 miles of it.  What a joy!