The Adventure Mobile

A small celebration had been planned, or at least contemplated. My Adventure Mobile was approaching 100,000 miles which is a major milestone for any vehicle. I hadn’t really given much thought as to just what I was going to do when the big moment occurred but a picture of the odometer was definitely on the list. And of course it would have to be posted to social media, most likely Facebook. It was 2 days before Valentine’s Day 2024.

This trip was to Hamcation in Orlando, FL which is a huge ham radio fest (hamfest) that drew close to 25,000 hams for the three day weekend event. I was on my way home from and driving through Tennessee when I noticed the van was less than 150 miles from hitting the milestone. And then somewhere in Kentucky I thought to look again and the odometer read 100138 miles. I had missed it and like so many things in life there was no going back.

The van, a 2020 Ford Transit Connect was bought new on January 31, 2021. My wife and I have a son, Paul, who works for Ford and because of that we are able to buy them on the A Plan which saves us a lot of money on new purchases.

For some time I had been visualizing what was wanted in such a vehicle but the biggest issue was that it had to be long enough for me to sleep in. My previous car was a Ford Escape which was just fine as a car at the time but retirement was approaching and my sights were widening. On the nearest to us Ford dealer lot I saw a van that looked to be what I needed. A tape measure showed the distance from the back seat to the rear door was 6’6″ which was more than enough room for my 5’9″ frame. A deal was struck which was immediately followed by plans for the first road trip.

That van was going to be my bed for many nights ahead. While retirement was nearing wealth was not. The van would be a free place to sleep while traveling. I bailed from the work life the moment it looked like we could afford it. Any sound financial advisor would have told me to keep working. What they couldn’t tell me was how long I would live and be healthy. A little chart I once saw helped put things in perspective. It indicated how long the typical person lives after retiring at various ages. One thing on that chart screamed at me. It was that the older a person worked before retiring the sooner death after retirement occurred. The inverse was that the younger a person retired the longer the average lifespan. That was taken very seriously and the retirement savings plans suddenly were taken much more seriously.

I had been a ham radio enthusiast for over a couple of decades earlier and it was something I wanted to get back into after retirement. But I didn’t just want to sit in a room with a radio, I wanted to travel and experience more of the world. There is a subset of ham radio called Parks on the Air. In it hams go out into parks and play radio. My hopes involved doing this throughout the country. Little did I know at the time how much this would influence and even dominate my life. Since then me and my Adventure Mobile have traveled in all 49 states as well as the District of Columbia. There is the Alaskan Highway which I drove from mile 0 into that state but there is no Hawaiian Highway which meant we had to fly to that one.

There are awards in Parks on the Air, often shortened to POTA, that are earned for various things. One of the most sought after one was for going to parks in every state and playing radio. Lo and behold, I was the first to ever earn that award!

So here we go. This is my first blog and in it I hope to tell stories that are mostly about those travels, ham radio, and how they intersect.

The Road to 50

There are days we wake up and know that a major milestone awaits. August 22, 2022 was one of those days. My wife Cyndi and I were on a road trip to the northeastern US states. It’s unusual that she accompany on one of my crazy road trips but for this one she did. Almost definitely it was in hopes of seeing some of the kinds of things that part of the country has to offer such as lighthouses, etc. And yes, we did do some of that and it was fun for both of us. But today was not about lighthouses, at least not to me.

A week before had left our wonderful dog Ellie at our daughter Susan’s house and took off. While Ellie was less than thrilled I couldn’t have been more excited. This trip was going to finish up a couple of goals that had begun some years before. To complete them the only thing needed was this road trip.

The first goal was the one that had been started about 10 years before. It was to have a beer that was brewed in every state capitol. This goal was very much a personal one meaning as no official rules or record keeping exists. Also, the beer just had to be brewed in the capitol city and did not have to be consumed in it. For me it was a fun little project that seemed to grow the closer I got to completing it. How many people in the world can say they have had a beer that was brewed in each of the US capitol cities? The list has to be extremely small and it is very likely that I am the only one who even cared about it. The real challenge to this was finding a beer that was actually brewed in the capitol city. But more on that later.

The second goal, and the one this blog will center on, is the Parks on the Air award for activating parks in 50 states. First, let me explain what “activating” a park means. Simply put, it is taking a ham radio station into a state or national park and making contacts with it there. To do this the station has to be portable and very much “bare bones” as compared to a home station that can be much more involved. An activator’s station almost never has such a luxury as an amplifier and is therefore limited to lower transmit power. Sometimes only 5 watts or less is used. Also, huge antenna towers don’t exist for the activator. Indeed, such limitations dramatically increase the challenge and also the fun. Exactly how such a station is set up depends on the individual and there are countless ways to get on the air for an activation.

The other side of the coin are the “hunters.” They are the ones who the activators contact via radio. The activator typically uses the POTA system’s spotting page to let the hunters know which frequency and which park is being activated. The hunters use this to know where to look with the hopes they can hear the station who is in the park and then to be able to actually make contact. None of this is guaranteed.

The combination of activating and hunting is when an activating station contacts another activating station. That is called a “park to park” contact and to successfully accomplish that multiplies the challenges for both stations.

There are a lot of awards in Parks on the Air but perhaps the most sought after one is the award for activating all states. As I began traveling this had yet to be achieved. Nobody had been to every state and activated. There had been several hunters who had gotten the award for hunting them all but not for activating. To do that required being in the state and there were a lot of people who sought to accomplish it.

Jason Johnston, whose call sign is W3AAX, is the head of Parks on the Air and it was largely his vision that got it started. I got to meet him at the huge Dayton, Ohio Hamvention hamfest in May of 2022 and it was a huge honor for me. Come to find out he is a very humble man and seems to be much less impressed with himself than others are of him. This is definitely a trait of many of my favorite people. During that 3 day event I mentioned to him how close I was to accomplishing the goal of activating 50 and that I expected to do it around August.

After actually completing it I sent him an email asking if he remembered that conversation. His response is one I just won’t delete. It reads: “I DO remember meeting you, and having the conversation on how close you were. I was in such disbelief until I reviewed the stats. Beyond well done, and thanks for being such a great steward of our program!!”

Let me say that Parks on the Air allows for a “wildcard” state if either the hunter or the activator has the District of Columbia in the log. Since I had indeed activated there it was only necessary for me to do it in 49 states to receive the award. Hawaii was the state not (yet) visited. That would about 8 months later and will be the source for stories yet to be told here.

At the beginning of this little ham radio odyssey I thought that it might be possible to be among the first 10 or so to earn the award but then the more time passed with nobody accomplishing it yet and the more states I had done, well, the idea of being the first to do it began to enter my mind. But truthfully, the expectations had become being among the first 5.

When we left our Illinois home on this trip only 7 states were needed to earn the Activated All States award and they were all in the northeast. Only one road trip was needed and waking up that morning in Massachusetts that number had been whittled down to 2, Rhode Island and Connecticut. And still nobody had earned the award. As astounding as it seemed, I was going to be the first to do it!

POTA has a Facebook group that I participate in and it is there many keep track of what is going on with regards to that little segment of ham radio. More than my share of pictures taken during my various park activations, etc., had been uploaded to that group. It’s a great resource in many ways. I could have easily posted there how close I was to accomplishing this goal. However, somewhere along the way I had become determined to be the first and the fear was that by making this information public would send someone out on a trip making them the first. It would be fair to say that I had become more than a little irrational when it came to this award.

Of course as we drove through each state we also stopped at a brewery in every state capitol with one exception. Montpelier is the capitol town of Vermont. It seemed so much more of a small town than a city and it was a very nice one. It had an exceptionally beautiful capitol building. The reason we didn’t stop into a brewery there is because there weren’t any. This was one of the four state capitol cities that didn’t have brewery. Two of the others, Pierre, South Dakota and Jackson, Mississippi both had home brewer supply stores and I was able to have a locally brewed beer there. However, Montpelier didn’t even have that. To accomplish having a beer that was brewed in that city required me finding a home brewer. With some networking I was able to do that and had a very nice beer in the house of a home brewer. We then took them out to dinner after. It was the least we could do! Unlike Parks on the Air, there was no “wildcard” with this quest.

Activating Rhode Island is kind of a lost memory for me. Maybe I will have to ask my wife to remind me what happened there. With no disrespect to that state I had my mind set on Connecticut which was going to be the final state needed.

We woke up that morning in a beautiful little seaside town south of Boston and set the GPS to the Rhode Island park of K-2881, the WWII Veterans Memorial State Park. It was raining lightly there and quickly 21 contacts were logged. That made 49 states activated and only one more to go!

Dinosaur State Park, K-1663 is located just about dead center of the state of Connecticut and was chosen to be the park activated. When Cyndi travels with me I try to find a park to activate that has something for her to do while I’m playing radio. This park offered an interpretive center for her to explore. Unfortunately we were there on a Monday and the center was closed on Mondays.

After leaving the park in Rhode Island the weather turned significantly worse. On the drive to Dinosaur we weren’t sure an activation was possible. Rain came down in torrents and at times visibility was minimal making driving dangerous. It seemed that the further we drove the worse the weather got and even the RainX on the windshield couldn’t keep it clear. The possibility of not being able to activate the park was being discussed and was a definite possibility. While I was not certain I could activate that day I was sure that we weren’t leaving the state until I had done a park!

For me to be the first person to earn this award is more than a little amazing. There are some hams who are extremely knowledgeable of the hobby. Such things as antenna theory, electronics designing, etc., etc., are far beyond me. If I were to describe my knowledge of such things I would put myself in the lower 1/3rd of all hams and that might be generous. Simply put my knowledge is on the low side. What I did well was to keep my station simple and to just keep traveling. Maybe I didn’t understand everything that was going on my system I did know that it worked well for me.

With only about 30 miles to go to the park the rain began to abate somewhat and with 10 miles to go stopped almost completely. It was suddenly looking good that today would indeed be the day!

When we finally reached Dinosaur State Park the rain had reduced to a light mist. Maybe this wasn’t ideal weather it was good enough. I immediately got busy setting up for my activation and Cyndi went looking around the park.

It has occurred to me the vast dichotomy with the history of where we were and what I was doing. This park is full of foot prints that were left by dinosaurs some 200 million years ago. Because of that it is an amazing place that takes the mind back to times that were so very different than those today. Here I was using a cell phone to spot myself on a computer based system that relied upon, among many other technologies, satellites to pass along information. What a difference a couple hundred million years makes! Say what you want about the good old days but I was happy to not have a Tyrannosaurs Rex trying to have me for lunch!

So, despite the light rain, the antenna was erected on top of my van, the radio plugged into the Lithium Ion Phosphate battery, and it was tuned to a frequency I found to be clear. It was time to grab the microphone and begin. Nerves, excitement, and even some adrenaline were all evident as I spotted myself on the POTA spotting page. I went to work. Typically I began an activation by contacting a few other activators park to park. This lets me know everything is working the way they are supposed to. And on that activation I did just that with W0AP who was in North Dakota letting me know that all was working as hoped.

To have a “legitimate activation” requires making at least 10 contacts from a park. The 10th at Dinosaur was W5LGK who lives in Georgia. Let there be no doubt that there was a celebration that happened immediately after and it continued for some time. A few who had been listening offered congratulations and, well, I couldn’t help myself by mentioning it more than a few times. At some point my wife showed up and took a few pictures of me with a microphone in hand and a huge smile on my face. I remember once re-spotting myself with “AAS” celebrating the event. Of course, “AAS” was for Activating All States. Later Julie, WT8J, who is the POTA mapping representative for Michigan and also in charge of social media sent me a screenshot of it. I was thrilled to see it and the sight continues to bring fond memories of a goal achieved.

Later while looking at the log of the 34 contacts made I saw W1AW in the log. W1AW is the huge and very famous station on the premises of the Amateur Radio Relay League in Newington, CT. It is the primary headquarters of United States ham radio. That contact was made only 8 minutes after the 10th so apparently I was still more than a little pumped up. How cool it was to have made a contact with the ARRL headquarters only minutes after earning the Activating All States award!

That evening we stopped in Hartford, CT which of course is the capitol city and had a beer that was brewed there. The following day found us in Trenton, NJ which is another capitol city that doesn’t have a brewery. Again networking enabled me to find a home brewer. This was the 50th state for that goal. Needless to say it was a good week!

The Ham Hat

Almost every ham has a “ham hat” and most of us have at least one ball cap that sports our call sign. Include me in that number. Getting that first one is a huge matter of pride. Choosing the colors of cap and lettering are big decisions in the journey of every new ham and it is something that takes more than a little thought. That cap helps tell the world that we are a licensed Amateur Radio operator and the call sign it displays is the only one like it in the world . It is as unique as the individual who wears it. We have studied for and passed FCC authorized tests to earn the right to wear it. Are we proud of that call sign? You better believe it! I fully confess to also having at least one shirt with my call sign on it and another that says POTA on it. In addition, I have a jacket that has my call sign in the colors of my local ham radio club. I wear all of it proudly.

Something unique about me is that I’m not really a fan of wearing ball caps. Yep, its definitely a quirk, one of those little things that makes me something between unique and flat our crazy. What I am a fan of are classic hats such as a Fedora from the “Sinatra era.” Now those are hats! Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be very many Fedoras with ham radio call signs on them.

Tangent Alert! Many years ago my brother Rex, sister Mindy, and my best friend Buzzie and I went on a ski trip to Aspen, Colorado. It was the Christmas / New Year’s week of December 1974. Only my sister had ever been on skis before so for the rest of us it was our first time.

One evening Rex, Buzzie, and I were walking the streets of Aspen going to dinner. A very popular movie of the time was Urban Cowboy and it featured western dress including cowboy hats and boots. Buzzie was very fond of such boots and me of hats. The three of us were walking along when a man and woman walked towards us. One of the two, I think him, wore the most amazing western hat I had ever seen. Any cowboy would have been more than proud to wear it. They walked right through us and all I saw was that incredible hat. It was truly an amazing wide brimmed beauty that must have cost a fortune! I was so close to asking about it but decided not to. Come to find out the other half of the couple, her I think,wore some equally impressive boots. I didn’t see them and am taking Buzzie’s word for this. He locked in on those boots and saw nothing else just as I had locked in on the hat.

They got past us and Rex stopped asking “Did you see who that was?” Neither Buzzie nor I saw who they were having only seen a pair of boots and a hat. He then told us it was Cher and Gregg Allman. They were a couple then and were apparently also in Aspen the same time we were. They had walked right through us and all I saw was a hat and all Buzzie saw were boots. End of tangent.

My first visit to the Huntsville Hamfest was in 2023 and as often happens before such an event I had made a list of things I hoped to find. At the top of that list was a “non-cap” ham hat. There were indeed a couple of hat vendors there and soon I found a hat that was satisfactory. It wasn’t a Fedora or close to it but at least it wasn’t a cap! It looked more like a fishing hat, one of those that are often seen with a couple of fish hooks and lures attached to it. Well, I wasn’t really interested in those kind of accoutrements on it and only my call sign N9VFR.

At the chosen vendor’s booth there was a line of other folks waiting to place their orders and yes, all of them had chosen caps. There I stood among them with the fishing style lid that was soon to be my ham hat. It was off white and navy blue lettering was decided upon. My money paid and decisions regarding thread colors explained I was told it would be 45 minutes before it was ready. Fair enough so off I went to see what else the hamfest had to offer.

At the appointed time a friend, Mike, KD9ARW, and I returned to pick up the hat. As things turned out it was just then being set up on the sewing machine. We stood watching and talked with the machine operator as we did so.

Somehow the conversation turned to unusual hats he has done. He told us about one guy who asked if his system could sew a fire hydrant on his cap. The answer was that his machine was capable of doing that so the request was made to sew a fire hydrant onto his hat. Questions about anything else he wanted on it such as his call sign were asked and the answer to that was no, only the fire hydrant.

The obvious next question was why he wanted that on his hat and the reply came that he would have to let the machine operator know what his call sign was. And the next question: “Ok, what’s your call sign?” The answer was K9PEE. He got his fire hydrant ham hat. It’s something I’ve been laughing about ever since.

Mary’s Crab Pots

There are things in life that are better than an adventure within an adventure but not very many of them. It was early July of 2022 and I was at Alaska’s Chilkat State Park, POTA # K-1642, which includes a point of land that divides the Pacific Ocean from an inlet into a smaller cove. It was a stunningly beautiful location with hazy snow capped rugged mountains as a backdrop and the calm protected sea only feet away. Occasionally a small boat would motor slowly past. Thinking back on it I realize an opportunity was missed to make a perfect screen saver or calming video. Seeing it again would definitely bring instant relaxation.

Behind me was a concrete boat ramp with a small parking area for vehicles. This is where I set up. Only a couple of boats were ever observed making use of the ramp and not very many other people seemed to come this far into the park. It was a perfect place to set up for a Parks on the Air activation and with the mountains leaving a clear way into most of the US mainland it offered an ideal opening to the south and east.

After making as many POTA contacts as possible I decided to explore. My location in Chilkat was at the beginning of a point of land that was only a few hundred yards wide and jutted out into the ocean for less than a half mile. At its beginning the spit of land was only slightly wider than the road leading to it but soon spread out to a few hundred yards.

Walking a counterclockwise route took me past the boat ramp and towards the inlet. Walking along the water was very difficult and rugged so I took one of the inland paths that seemed to lead to the shoreline. Soon I found a small rocky area and a man swimming with his child. I walked past them a short distance and sat on the rocks enjoying the mountainous scenery from a different angle. An aluminum boat pulled up.

Her name was Mary, or at least I think it was. Her boat was about 15 feet long and had the common V shaped front and some equipment on board. She first approached the guy who was swimming but saw his kid and came to me. It was obvious that I was not her first choice. He was younger and much fitter than me. She asked for help with the boat.

This brought a bit of a conundrum for me. We were total strangers and I was an awfully long way from home. I had no idea of what her intentions were and it occurred to me that maybe she wanted to abduct me or perhaps murder me and throw my body overboard. Or perhaps she planned to do unimaginable things that I didn’t want her to do. If any of those were what she wanted to do then getting on that boat would guarantee my fate. Without a doubt she was the more rugged of the two of us. She wasn’t very tall but was stoutly built and gave me the sense of being, well, rough. Definitely she was much rougher than I. Despite such concerns and because of my love of finding a new adventure I agreed to get on the boat and help her. Also, there is just something about a damsel in distress that is hard for us men to refuse. As it turned out she really did need help and I was going to survive. Spoiler alert! I did.

She had bought her boat only the day before and didn’t really know how everything worked on it. This was her maiden voyage with it and I was being asked to help her figure things out.

It came with about a dozen crab pots and a battery operated electric winch to lower and then raise the pots. Me, having lived most of my life in the Midwest state of Illinois had never seen a crab pot. Here crabs are only found in seafood restaurants. My knowledge of the working of a crab boat was exactly zero! I live a very short distance from the Mississippi River just up from St. Louis, MO. There is plenty of fishing there but none of it involves harvesting crabs. Catfish maybe, but not crabs.

Someone, I think it was the guy who had sold her the boat, had told Mary there were crabs in 30 feet of water and that they were being found in this inlet. Her boat had a depth finder on it and she pulled away from the shore using it to look for that depth of water. This was the first time I had ever seen crab pots and they looked kind of like what we used to keep some of our bait alive while fishing from a john boat back home. They were circular wire and are a couple of feet tall when stretched out. A trap door lets the crabs in and then keeps them there. They were linked together with a nylon rope that was kind of like a ski rope and a colored float that was set to the length that would allow the pots to settle on the bottom of the water. Everybody who set out crab pots used such floats and had their own unique color combination to identify their pots from those of others. Apparently these folks operated on the crab fishing honor system and only harvested crabs from their own pots.

So off we went into the inlet with her on the motor and me trying to figure out how to operate the winch. She didn’t yet know how to operate it fully so it became my project to figure it out. The thing would pull the pots up but would not let them down and it was supposed to go both ways. After a few minutes it was determined that the motor only ran one way and it was necessary to string the nylon cord differently depending on which way the operator wanted it to go.

That problem solved we went about setting the pots. My job was to drop an anchovy into each pot and then to hoist the trap overboard and run the winch lowering the pot. Each pot was supposed to get two anchovies but she only had enough for one per pot. Mary was watching the depth meter, running the motor, and steering or at least she was supposed to be doing all of that. At one point I looked away from my crab pot duties to discover some huge rocks along the shore and they were only a few feet off the port bow. (For you non nautical types that is the front left side of the boat.) She thought the boat was idling in the middle of the inlet when it was actually moving! We were very close to wiping out on those rocks!!

Finally, we were getting things figured out and developing a nice routine of baiting and dropping the crab pots overboard when we heard laughter. We both looked up to see a teen aged boy and a couple of girls in a small boat that was close to the launch pad where my van was parked. They were trying to bait some hooks but bald eagles kept trying to swoop down and take the bait out of their hands. Seeing bald eagles behaving like this might have been a common occurrence there but was something I had never seen. To me eagles are a rare and special sight and usually only happens in the month of January But Haines, AK is in the middle of eagle country. Only a few miles away is the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle State Preserve (POTA K-7240.) They are plentiful there. Watching those huge birds swoop down and try to steal cut bait from those laughing kids was both incredible and hilarious. Mary and I both stopped our labors and laughed along with them.

Finally we finished our crabbing duties and she pulled up to the boat ramp to drop me off. She couldn’t get quite close enough to the shore and it was necessary for me to jump off the boat with one foot in the water. It was cold! How that man and his child were swimming in it was proof again that Alaskans are much tougher than I.

I returned to the same spot the next day to again play radio and with the hopes of seeing Mary again. I was interested in hearing about how the crab pots we set out had done. Unfortunately, she was nowhere to be found and no such news of success or failure came. It would be great to see her again to hear about her new business enterprise. She didn’t seem like a very knowledgeable investor in the crabbing business but hopefully she did well with her new boat and as a a crab harvester. It was a lot of fun to help her. While assisting on a crab boat was never on my bucket list it was a fun item to tick on my list of unique experiences. Thanks Mary for a fun adventure!

Northwest Trip – Iowa

The trip to the northwest had been imagined for quite some time and fortunately for me it was delayed. The reason for the delay was Covid19 which, of course, shut down the entire country and even most of the world for well over a year. During that delay I returned to ham radio and discovered Parks on the Air. Hence the fortunate for me part. The rough outline of this adventure was made before I got back into ham radio and before I even knew what Parks on the Air was. It was also before the arrival of retirement.

Times changed, life changed, and the road called. Covid was fading, retirement had arrived, and POTA had entered my life. My first trip which was to the South was in the books and lessons had been learned with significant improvements made on how I did things. For example, the rear two rows of seats in the Adventure Mobile had been removed and were replaced with a hand built bed. It was set up to have plenty of storage which was something the previous trip had showed was needed.

A piece of luggage that was typically carried on a flight was measured and found to be 10″ high when laid on its back. That became the height of the bed above the floor of the van making the entire bottom usable for storage. Because my job involved working with pipe it was something I was familiar with. Therefore the bed was supported by pipe floor flanges top and bottom with 3/4″ pipe between. A plywood base was cut to fit a twin sized memory foam mattress and my bed was ready to go.

The rough outline of the road trip would take me out of Southwest Illinois, through Iowa and then to Nebraska before making my way northward through the Dakotas largely following the Missouri River. From there my route would include the rest of the upper tier of states that included Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Next it would take me down to Oregon and a stop to visit family in Portland and then to Eureka, California to spend time with a friend. The Bay Area would be the turnaround point after visiting our son, his wife, and our grandson there. Nevada, Utah, Colorado Wyoming, and Kansas would make up the homeward leg. Of course the capitol city was to be visited in every state with the requisite social media selfie to be taken in front of each capitol building and then a beer. That was the outline of this trip and it included plenty of flexibility to divert at will. Obviously at least one park was to be activated in every state.

On September 9, 2021 I headed out on what was to become almost a month long trip. The first state visited was Iowa and it was there that the first of many signs for the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail was sighted. In Parks on the Air this trail is K-4572 and it is one that goes through 16 states. My home is only a few miles from where they spent the winter of 1803 – 1804 before the Spring found them beginning their journey against the stiff Missouri River current and beyond. A regret was not activating that trail in every state to the north and west. To a very large extent I followed their route almost to its end in Washington state west of Portland, OR. Their Corps of Discovery went as far as to where the Columbia river emptied into the Pacific Ocean at a site they called Camp Disappointment. Pursuing this would have included 11 states and I only activated that trail in a few of them. It would not have been difficult at all to do the rest and a fun little side project would have been the result. The handful of eastern states along that trail would have been much easier to reach than those northwest ones.

I was driving through Iowa on my way to the capitol city of Des Moines when a road sign was passed that said the American Gothic house was ahead. It seems like the sign said 18 miles. At first it didn’t quite register with me but after a couple miles of driving and thinking about that sign the car was turned around to get second look. Sure enough, the house from the famous painting was up ahead. This was totally unexpected and was something I just had to stop for and see.

You probably are familiar with the painting. It is of a man with a pitchfork standing next to a woman in front of a house that sported a unique second story gothic style window. To me it had always somehow defined farm life in America at the turn of the 20th century. One could almost hear the livestock and the dour expressions on the couple’s faces just screamed that life on that farm was very hard. The reality of it was found to be completely different from what I had imagined.

This house is not on a farm at all but is located only a few blocks off the highway in Eldon, Iowa which is a small riverside town not far from Ottumwa. There are no fields of hay so no need for a pitchfork. It is quite close to neighboring houses so nothing like a barn existed. The two people in the picture are not a farmer and his wife or daughter at all but instead are a dentist and the sister of the artist. That picture, which looked to be such an authentic depiction of early American farm life turned out to nothing of the sort. Seeing the house and learning the truth of the painting was one of those moments in life that makes one question everything ever believed. However, I did come away with a much greater appreciation of the artist’s eye. Something about that house took his imagination to a place and he was able to capture it perfectly in the painting. A classic American painting was the result.

Not to be stuck in, well, Camp Disappointment I continued on with my own little trip of discovery. States needed to be explored, parks needed to be activated, and capitol cities needed to have at least one locally brewed beer consumed.