Things I've Learned from This Year's Travels

It has been a great year of seeing the USA. I don't think I traveled much in 2009 but 2010 was not lacking in suitcase packing! Here are some things I learned from my many travels.

• Jack Frost also takes his winter vacation in Florida.(Click here for that post.)
• Someone figured out that there was money to be made at the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. When Pastor Dad and I visited in 1979 a janitor let us inside to see "the window." Thirty-one years later it cost about $13 per person for the same privilege. (Click here for that post.)
• Elvis is dead. And there really is a Jungle Room. I held out hope that neither was true. (Click here for that post.)
• The Civil War -er- War of Northern Aggression is not over in some places. (No separate post for this fact. You'll just need to take my word for it.)
• Apparently every regiment from the state of Ohio that fought at Vickburg raised their own battlefield monument as opposed to erecting one to represent the whole state. (There was a brief post, but no pictures of the many monuments.)
• When someone in Texas tells you they're packing, they don't mean their suitcase! (I learned this on our second visit of the year to this state.)
• Evidently elected officials don't constitute the whole of the vermin problem in our nation's Capitol. (Click here for that post.)
• When Cincinnati Reds fans meet St. Louis Cardinal fans in a water taxi in Baltimore they will talk about how the Orioles are doing but will not discuss the pennant race that their own teams are experiencing if there is a storm perchance the boat capsizes and they need to be friendly enough to pull each other out of the waves. (No pictures or post, but it was scary. And I mean the water taxi in the storm, not the pennant race which we - the Cincinnati Reds and fans - ultimately won.)
• They don't turn the lights off and roll up the sidewalks at 8 p.m. in all small Kentucky towns, but in some the visitors can be identified as the ones who are still awake after that time. (Much to The Bear's chagrin and boredom.)
• Well, Pilgrim, this year Indian Summer showed up in Detroit during Thanksgiving week. (When we arrived there on Monday evening of that week the temperatures were well in the 70s. It was a most unseasonably warm day! And much enjoyed, too.)
• New TSA regulations mean that any passenger's anatomy can be viewed as scantily clad as a Las Vegas showgirl's except the passenger buys the ticket for the show instead of the viewer doing so. Doesn't seem fair somehow. (More on my trip to visit my daughter later. I'm still unpacking. And going to basketball games. And doing laundry. And generally resuming my normal life.)

I suspect my travels for 2010 are done. It has been so much fun to ride planes, trains, and automobiles as I've crisscrossed this wonderful nation of ours from east to west and north to south. I look forward to seeing where the Lord and Pastor Dad take me in 2011,  Hint! Hint!