Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Adding Up The Miles

Hello again!   I hope you've had a great couple of weeks!  We certainly did!  With 2230 miles added to the Harley speedometer, we covered a lot of this beautiful country in the last few days.
 
First on our itinerary - Fallingwater.  We've been Frank Lloyd Wright fans for years and have always hoped to get here some day.  We've visited Taliesin in Wisconsin but Fallingwater is much more impressive. 
 

Built for the Kaufmann family as a summer getaway back in the 1930's, Wright constructed this unique home over top of a waterfall. 


He anchored it in the existing rocks and I'm sure it was an engineering nightmare at the time.  The beauty of the stream and trees and the work of the Conservancy to maintain the property make this a wonderful destination for anyone who admires the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Just one of the interesting trees on the property  - I call this the smiling tree!

We continued our travel across the state of Pennsylvannia and found lots of interesting little towns and stopping points.  This little log cabin gift shop of course caught my eye! 
But our next destination was Gettysburg.  Several years ago, when E was a grad student at Penn State, we stopped here on our way back from Washington, D.C. and toured the battlefields.  We bought a CD that was a self-guided tour and something I would recommend to everyone.  Next time we're through here, I'd like to take one of the bus tours.  It was pretty warm on this day and this tour group was lucky to have the shade of one of the big old trees.
Last time we were here, it was late winter so not much was open downtown.  This time, we browsed through some of the shops and had lunch at a corner "tavern".  The Saturday morning Farmer's Market was just about over, but we enjoyed looking at the wonderful fresh veggies, fruits and other products. 
These statues downtown looked very lifelike, right down to the corduory on the tourist's slacks!

Well, that's it for the first TWO days of our vacation.  We covered so much ground that it's going to take me a few more posts to get it all "blogged".  I probably should have tried to blog from the motel room every night, but since we didn't have a real set travel plan, we would figure out each night where we wanted to go the next day and what we wanted to see. With sometimes sluggish, or non-existent internet connections, we we lucky to get that done.   But it was great to not have to be anywhere in particular and take our time to get to where we wanted to be.   Even though we had some hot days of travel, the Harley was in top running condition and our little trailer came in handy as we collected our "souvenirs" along the way. 
Thanks for not giving up on me!  I'll be back with the rest of the trip soon.

1 comment:

Lori said...

Sounds like a wonderful time! I'm envious. That ol green eyed monster doesn't hit me very often but hearing of a motorcycle vacation can bring it out in a heart beat. ;) Glad you had a safe trip!