Lewie's Travel Web

My wife, Betty, and I enjoy traveling by automobile, and we visit many places in the USA and Canada  that are visited by millions of other tourists every year.  Most trips tend to be long, but the visit to each place is usually short.  Nights are spent in motels except for for a few spots where we tent camp for a few days.  We take lots of pictures and video of all places visited.

This web site is intended to help others plan their visits by our telling what we did and saw in some of our travels. Our trips started in 1996 and have continued each summer. The longest was in 1997 that included a driving trip to Alaska, with a round trip driving distance of 15,000 miles.

When I started this web site, I planned to write about each park or significant place visited. I have not been faithful to make reports on most of the places visited before 2001. The trip of 2001 is complete. A summary page and 22 additional pages describe almost all of the 2001 trip in chronological order. Some of the pages are large and will take several minutes to load with a telephone line modem.

To get started, click in one of the boxes below, or on any of the highlighted words below.

Year 2004 trips. The Hershey Winter Reunion was the start of the trips of 2004. Following the reunion, visits were made to Busch Gardens, Venice Rookery, Corkscrew Swamp, and Ding Darling NWR.

Year 2003 trip. Our trip of 2003 was longer than most. As before, we started with the Hershey reunion in Earl Park, IN, and then traveled north with a lot of stops on the way to Yellowknife, NWT. Once there, we flew to Treeline for a short stay, and then back to Yellowknife. After returning to Yellowknife, we headed south with more stops in Alberta and British Columbia, and then back into the US.  In the US, we continued to head south as far as the Arizona border with Mexico, and then east to home in Austin, TX. This trip was almost 10 weeks long, and included 14,076 miles. We took 5388 pictures, most with a digital camera.

The 2003 travelog description of the trip has been divided into parts. The first part is from Earl Park to Mackinac Island. The second part is from when we crossed into Ontario, Canada to Treeline in the Northwest Territories. The third part is from Yellowknife to Las Vegas. The last part is from the canyons of Utah to home.

Year 2002 trips. We started our trips in 2002 with a January trip to Florida. The central purpose of this trip was to participate in the Hershey Winter Reunion. A second purpose was to visit wildlife refuges in the area and photograph whatever wildlife that we saw. Refuges visited included  Ding Darling and Merritt Island. Next was an Alaskan brown bear viewing trip. The summer Hershey reunion was followed by a road trip to Newfoundland.

Year 2001 trip. Our trip in 2001 included another look at Alaska, but of course there was much more than just Alaska. This trip starts with the Hershey summer reunion in Indiana, and ends in Big Spring, Texas. Several Canadian parks, Vancouver and Victoria, BC, a trip from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, a Princess Line cruise, and visits to volcanoes, waterfalls, a rock garden,  Zion and Great Basin National Parks, the "Loneliest road in America," Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, the London Bridge, and the Very Large Array are some of the stops we made. For the complete story, click here for 2001.  

Year 2000 trips. Our first trip of the year 2000 included the following during 16 July through 16 August: Rocky Mountain National Park; Lander, Wyoming; Yellowstone National Park (third time); Double Cabin campground in Shoshone National Forest; Pompey's Pillar National Landmark; Roosevelt National Park; Jamestown, North Dakota; Hershey family reunion in Earl Park, Indiana; Pro Football Hall of Fame; Fort Necessity National Battlefield; Jamestown Settlement and Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; Berkeley Plantation; New River Gorge Bridge; and the Blenko Glass factory. Almost 7000 miles.

Christmas at the Barber's was a joyous occasion this year.

1999 trips.

In 1999 we visited Smoky Mountain National Park, Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, VA, Philadelphia, PA, Newport, RI, Cape Cod, Fall foliage in New Hampshire and Vermont, and then the Polar Bears of Churchill, Manitoba. On our way home from Canada, we made visits to several interesting places in North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and then visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We had intentions to make several visits along the gulf coast, but we were too anxious to see the polar bear pictures. The gulf coast will be for next summer.

Places we have visited in the summers of 1996 to 1998 include Arches, Badlands, Big Bend, Crater Lake, Denali, Dyea, Glacier, Grand Canyon,  Jasper (Canada, tent camped), Kenai, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Olympic, Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Redwoods, Sequoia, Yellowstone (three times, with tent camping) and Yosemite (tent camped)  National Parks.

Also, Cabrillo, Casa Granda, Colorado, Craters of the Moon, Devils Tower, Oregon Caves, and Tonto National Monuments.

Other sites include Albuquerque Kodak Balloon Fiesta, Grant-Koors Ranch Historic Site, EBR-1 National Historic Landmark, Capulin Volcanic Monument, Grand Coolly Dam, Hearst Castle, McDonald Observatory, Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Musk Ox Farm, Niagara Falls, Oregon Aquarium, Pebble Beach 17 mile drive, Sea Lion Caves, and Walls Drug Store, home of "free ice water."

Chicken AK, Hollywood CA, Homer AK, Hyder AK, San Francisco CA, Skagway AK, Virginia City MT, and Dawson City, Watson Lake, and Whitehorse in Yukon Territory are some of the towns visited that rate special mention.

The Alaskan Highway, Apache Trail, Cassiar Highway, Dawson Highway, and Top of the World Highway are also worthy of descriptions.

If you have questions about any of these places, e-mail me at   barberlewie@hotmail.com.  

This page was last updated on 03/10/04.