{"id":1383,"date":"2012-10-02T15:37:54","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T22:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel\/?p=1383"},"modified":"2012-12-14T05:00:58","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T12:00:58","slug":"october-3-home-again-and-epilog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/2012\/10\/02\/october-3-home-again-and-epilog\/","title":{"rendered":"October 2: Home Again and Epilog"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Mile 12,631 &#8211; Home Again.<\/strong>\u00a0 Our last day, we drove home\u00a0from Austin, Pennsylvania.\u00a0 It was only the third day (out of 63) without any\u00a0sunshine.\u00a0 The weather was dreary and drizzly when we arrived.<\/p>\n<p>Those of you who have been following the blog regularly may have read some of my sneering comments about other tourists and tourist traps.\u00a0\u00a0The overpriced hoopla and\u00a0interminable &#8220;commutes&#8221; in-and-out of Yellowstone and Grand Canyon National Parks are not the fault of the Park Service.\u00a0 The truth is that the most popular attractions suffer from their own popularity.\u00a0 Providing more services and accommodations will only make things worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Some of my more memorable experiences\u00a0were often spontaneous surprises in not-so-famous places:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Taking a swim in a lake in Northern Minnesota<\/li>\n<li>The Grand Coulee landscape in Washington state<\/li>\n<li>The kite festival in Long Beach,\u00a0Washington<\/li>\n<li>Driving down an abandoned\u00a0stretch of old Route 66 in Arizona<\/li>\n<li>Hiking the Pancake trail near Pikes Peak with my friend Johanne<\/li>\n<li>And a silly afternoon with P.J.&#8217;s sister Wendy and brother-in-law, near the Kinzua Dam<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We threw apple cores into the Allegheny River and, to our surprise, the cores\u00a0got caught in eddies and started floating up-stream until they got caught in the rapids.\u00a0 Watching that process was a pleasantly mesmerizing, relaxing, and educational activity (in hydrodynamics) on a beautiful day in the beautiful Pennsylvania Wilds.<\/p>\n<p>On my next cross-country trip, which will not be any time soon, I&#8217;d like to spend more time visiting not-so-famous places and places I have not been before.\u00a0 I also want to plan a destination trip to Yellowstone, with accommodations inside the park.\u00a0 That park may be crowded, but it is also big\u00a0enough so you can escape the crowds if you are willing to walk.\u00a0 And it has such a variety of sights to see!<\/p>\n<p>This\u00a0concludes my daily posts.\u00a0 I\u00a0have updated\u00a0the highlights and lowlights with trip summary entries, and P.J. still has more pictures to upload.\u00a0\u00a0We hope to have the blog complete soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mile 12,631 &#8211; Home Again.\u00a0 Our last day, we drove home\u00a0from Austin, Pennsylvania.\u00a0 It was only the third day (out of 63) without any\u00a0sunshine.\u00a0 The weather was dreary and drizzly when we arrived. Those of you who have been following the blog regularly may have read some of my sneering comments about other tourists and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/2012\/10\/02\/october-3-home-again-and-epilog\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;October 2: Home Again and Epilog&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arjan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1390,"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions\/1390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pjgardner.com\/travel1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}