On any trip, the destination is the reason for leaving home but, take my advice…
DON’T ignore the journey.
Google maps will get you where you’re going but…OLD school REAL maps are necessary research tools.
I got out the Rand McNally road atlas and looked at the different towns along my route. Then I Googled those towns to find out what might be in them of interest.
After that, I used Facebook to query my friends who might have traveled the same route or lived in the area to ask what THEY thought I should see.
Finally it was off to my GPS to enter addresses.
Last week, I took a quick 3 day road trip to connect with a past I never knew I had until about a dozen years ago. As an adoptee, I found my birth mom in 2001 and started piecing together my real family history. It’s been a passion full of twists and turns each more fascinating than the last.
The old family homestead was in the tiny community of Spade Texas and last week, my sister, mom and stepdad, none of which had ever been to see the old family cemetery, made the trip. My sister from Kearney Nebraska, Mom and Carl from Phoenix and me…From the Grand Canyon.
As we discovered the EXISTING Spade Texas was NOT the site of the OLD Spade Texas and had we not met some very nice but rather perplexed folks at the local EXISTING Spade COOP…We would have never known.
