Monuments, Mounds and Mountains

Two weeks back (yeah, I'm really behind the times) Paul and I embarked on our grand trip our west - four days, 2000 miles from Clifton, Virginia to Durango, Colorado.  It was actually a really neat trip - traveling through different cultural and physical landscapes, seeing the west unfold over a couple days, and trying to get the best gas mileage possible in my Jetta (and analyzing the reasons why we weren't getting as good mileage as we could).  Day one took us to Indiana, Day two to western Illinois, the Cahokia Mounds site, and St Louis, day three to Kansas, and day four to Colorado.

Did you know that it takes a very long time to drive through West Virginia and Kentucky?  We spent most of the day doing just that - going first through western Maryland, then lengthways through both WV and KY.  A lot of rolling hills and farms and that still-near-home feeling.  We stopped for the night in Evansville, Indiana, just shortly after everything got flat.

Monk's Mound from a distance - it's so big that it's hard to get a good picture!

After all that driving, we were glad to have only a few hours to our destination for day two: Cahokia Mounds Historic Site.  Anyone who is a student of North American archaeology knows that Cahokia is just about as cool as it gets.  It is the best example of a pre-Columbian city north of the Rio Grande; at Cahokia's height 15-20,000 inhabitants lived on the site.  Just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Cahokia was a huge center of the Mississippian "mound-building" tradition.  Today the park preserves about 70 of the 80-100+ mounds that Native Americans built early in the second millennium AD.  Some have burials, but others were most likely used for ceremonial purposes.  Most prominent is Monk's Mound, the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in North America.

Paul and me halfway up Monk's Mound

For several years, Cahokia has been one of those must-visit places for me, so I was thrilled that we could take time to see the site.  (I was even more thrilled that Paul was such a good sport about putting up with my nerdy infatuation with the place.)  We took a four or five mile hike around the site, visiting Mound 72 and Monk's Mound.  There was also a great late-80s/early-90s museum that made me feel like a kid again.  That evening, Paul and I drove into St. Louis to see the gateway arch and get some good beer at a local brewery.  From the little I got to see, I really liked the city.

Day three took us through Missouri (flat, but lots of trees), and Kansas (just as flat, but without all the trees).  I believe we were pretty tired of driving by this time, but there were some neat sights to be seen.  A lot of wind turbines, pro-life roadsigns (I think we saw the most in Missouri and Kansas), and corn.  Not much else to say about that.  We stopped for the night in Larned, KS, where we stayed with Paul's cousin Mark and his family.  They took us out for some delicious Mexican food and (my favorite) a trip to the county fair.  We got to see all kinds of animals, from chickens to goats to horses, as well as a neat rodeo.

 Roping a calf at the rodeo in Larned, KS

I'm convinced that the sky gets bigger as you go out west.  Maybe I'm just used to Virginia woods and buildings everywhere, but for real - there is so much sky to be seen.  You could see that more and more as we drove through the rest of Kansas and into Colorado.  There were some stretches of road in eastern Colorado where we didn't see anything (or anyone) but landscape for fifty miles or more.  It was absolutely beautiful once we started getting into the mountains.  Unfortunately, we hit a huge rainstorm between the Rockies and the San Juan mountains and it lasted all the way to Durango.

Nothing for miles and miles

It was a pretty cool (albeit exhausting) trip.  I must say I was very glad when the driving was over, though that meant dropping Paul off at the (tiny) Durango airport on Sunday morning.  I'll be picking him up ten weeks from that day - October 3 - for the return trip once my internship at Crow Canyon is finished.  We're going to take a little longer for the return journey, so I can give Paul a tour of some of my favorite places in the southwest.