Over 5,000 miles driving through 14 mountain and midwest states in 5 weeks

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I’ve written this primarily as a record for Linnéa of our trip together, and for those we visited who might be interested. If you enjoy it, so much the better.

 

In mid-October my mother’s brother Carl Gleysteen (as there will be lots of Gleysteens, hereafter just G.) turned 100 in Milwaukee, thus following his mother – my grandmother G. – for whose 100th birthday I came home (to the States) from India in 1984.

 

In the spring I started planning to attend the party we would surely have for uncle Carl in October – and I thought:

• if I’m going to Milwaukee, I might as well also visit mother’s family’s summer cottage (of which I’m now 1/3 owner, but don’t get there very often) and nearby relatives at Lake Okoboji in northwest Iowa;

• and if going there, I might as well visit an elementary-school friend in Fargo, North Dakota whom I hadn’t seen since 1958 (though recently we’ve emailed a lot);

• and if going there, I might as well visit the Frederick L. Wicks Prairie Wildlife Sanctuary in northwestern ND, which (named for my paternal grandfather) we gave to the National Audubon Society when my father was dying in 1991;

• and if going there, I might as well visit Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park, neither of which I’d ever seen;

• and if going there, I might as well visit my high school senior English teacher – with whom I’ve corresponded but hadn’t seen for over 40 years – in Salt Lake City;

• and if going there, I might as well attend Alumni Homecoming at St. John’s College (SJC) – the “Great Books College” – in Santa Fe;

• and if going there, I might as well visit a Navajo SJC schoolmate in Navaho Nation (northeastern Arizona), as well as the nearby Grand Canyon, which I hadn’t seen since age 8;

• and if going there, I might as well visit distant relatives whom I’d wanted to meet in Las Vegas, as well as an SJC-Annapolis schoolmate in Reno.

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In the end I added lots more people and places (mostly in the Midwest), including

• Linnéa’s “hillbilly” friend in southern Missouri;

• my (transgender) economist friend Deirdre McCloskey in Chicago (her memoir is fascinating);

• Linnéa’s godfather John Hickenlooper, governor of Colorado;

• a Zen retreat center in southeast Minnesota;

• Iowa City where I was born (including childhood friends), and the nearby Amana Colonies with their “communist” history;

• tapings of two National Public Radio (NPR) shows, and ;

• my high school junior English teacher in Moorhead, Minnesota; and

• distant relatives in South Dakota and Wisconsin whom I’d only met via Ancestry.com or 23andME.com (DNA). 

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But in April-May I took a long driving trip from Amsterdam through France to Andorra and back, and realized that I couldn’t do as much driving as I’d planned. Whereas I used to be able to drive all day and all night, now, with too much driving, my neck and shoulders tighten up (maybe especially the right sternocleidomastoideus muscle) and I get headaches.

 

Since son Hendrik (19) has a driver’s license, I thought about asking him if he wanted to go along to help with the driving, but he is living with his girlfriend and looking for work, so that wasn’t appropriate. Daughter Linnéa (22), however, was planning a year off from medical school – she’s halfway through – so, if she got her driver’s license, she could go with me. She’d been close to getting her license when she was in Alaska a few years ago after high school (they can start medical school here directly after high school), but she ran out of driving-practice time. Would she want to go to Alaska and get her license (which would be easier there, and less expensive, than in Sweden)? She was willing to give it a try.

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Here's what happened.