Carl Henning

Bourbon and baseball in Kentucky. Wooden bats are real bats; aluminum bats should take their place with the Designated Hitter as abominations. The only downside of the factory tour was “No Photos.” They showed the old way… by hand. And the new way with CNC equipment. Gift shop had signed baseballs! I got one.

There are exactly a gazillion distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. We visited a few of them with friends.

The US Air Force Academy Chapel is both a religious and engineering marvel. I maybe marveled at the engineering a lot – can’t help my roots.

How do you mine paint? Well, dating from prehistoric times native Americans used pigments found in nature. At the Paint Mines Interpretive Park in Colorado you can learn more about it.

Usually the winners write the history. But at the battle of the Little Bighorn, the losers wrote it; the losers, that is, the whites. At Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, corrections are made.

There are some apps for my iPhone that are indispensable for automobile travel. A free downloadable map program. Finding off-beat attractions. AAA, your auto insurer, weather, and more are recommended. Including one that provides a tour guide in your car, virtually.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park has three units: North, South, and Elkhorn Ranch. We did get to the North Unit. Somehow going due north took us into the Central Time Zone. We saw virtually no wildlife, but we did see beautiful scenery and cannon balls (the rock formations, not iron balls shot from cannons).

From Theodore Roosevelt’s face on Mount Rushmore to Theodore Roosevelt National Park which hosts a cabin he stayed in while in North Dakota.

The kids headed home after the morning visit to Mount Rushmore, leaving Kay and I to continue our epic journey with Wall Drugs, Badlands, and Missiles.

Mount Rushmore: It’s smaller than you thought. It’s more crowded than you thought. It’s farther from civilization than you thought. But Mount Rushmore is an inspiring monument.