Road Trip — House Museums from Atlanta to Salt Lake City
Written on October 24, 2008 at 10:06 am, by Lain
When my mom asked me to help my sister drive to Salt Lake City in November, I took it as an opportunity to geek out like whoa.
While I’m happy to help Susie and her dog Hazel get to Salt Lake City, I’m mostly excited to see as many house museums as possible along the way. I even mapped some out.
You can
find the full map here with descriptions and pictures of each museum.
The basic plan is to visit house museums in and around Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver.
If I can find cool house museums in Topeka, Lawrence, and Manhattan, Kansas, we’ll cut across that way. Otherwise, I have not been to Iowa or Nebraska, so we’ll stop in Omaha and Lincoln.
Here are the burning questions at this point–
- Which are the best house museums along the way? The worst?
- How can we best document our story–blogging, podcasting, twittering, video recording, what?
- Will this be the single lamest road trip ever undertaken?
- What do we do with the dog when visiting house museums?
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Amber Suitt
Program Director
Lain Shakespeare
Executive Director
10 Comments to Road Trip — House Museums from Atlanta to Salt Lake City
Lain, sounds fantastic. Although please remember Omaha and Lincoln have nothing to do with Iowa. I realize that if you cruise north on 29, you will technically be in Iowa, and you will drive through Council Bluffs. Please don’t let this experience be your lasting impression of the great state that is Iowa. Council Bluffs is Iowa’s version of the mutant step-sister that gets hidden in the basement to avoid startling guests.
Also, its probably a little out of the way, but you could always shoot up to Springfield, IL to check out the Lincoln home. Then over to Hannibal, MO to check out the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum.
I can’t tell from the map, but are you stopping in Red Cloud, NE for Willa Cather? I am pretty sure you can visit her childhood home – does that count as a house museum?
Langston Hughes and William S. Burroughs are from Lawrence, KS. I don’t know if their childhood homes are intact but I’m sure the internet can tell you. I feel like there were a lot of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists who grew up in Kansas but maybe I’m thinking of Ohio…
Okay, so Langston Hughes’ home is now tragically a duplex (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5757) and I can’t find anything on WSB’s house since he died so recently…I don’t know if it even has a historic designation yet? I was wrong; he’s not from Kansas, he just lived there for a long time until he died.
Kirk, Hannibal is a good idea. Apparently Quincy, IL has a lot of historic homes, too. I will never confuse Iowa and Nebraska, trust me.
Christa, great suggestions. You should do my work for me more often. Our route is pretty flexible, so we can make a lot of it work I’m sure.
Willa Cather’s childhood home absolutely counts. Looks like they’ve got a bunch of other stuff too: http://www.willacather.org/historic_sites.htm
Maybe we’ll just loiter around Langston Hughes’ duplex. And it looks like that as of three years ago someone had tried to get historic designation on Burrough’s house — http://is.gd/4QHp. If we can’t see it we’ll just rent Drugstore Cowboy and say we went.
While Lain says our route is flexible, keep in mind that both I and Hazel would like to limit this road trip to…under a week.
Dude. This is awesome. Get an agent and line up a book deal (there have been published travelogues that had much less to go on). Cash in hand, you can pay off your sister to drag the trip out. Seriously.
Good point, Tim. I do take cash.
Suzie where is your sense of adventure? How can you stand in the way of the education of our Executive Director? Gosh think of the long trip as a chance to bond with your brother. There is no replacement for family. (smiles)
How about the Laura Ingalls Wilder house, where she wrote the books? That’s in MO, isn’t it?
Good call, Deb. I put it on the map. But don’t tell my mom, she’ll want to come along with us.