A continuing series from Forrest Preece
The road trip of August 2010: from New Orleans to Buffalo, New York
By Gay Gillen, Travel Planner
Asking me to describe my favorite summer vacation is like asking a parent to name their favorite child. As I think of which vacation was my favorite, I have a million memories flooding my mind. This one is a good choice.
The road trip of August 2010: from New Orleans to Buffalo, New York
With no set timetable except to celebrate my brother’s birthday in Destin, Florida, we stopped for a few days at Brownell Travel, my home office, in Birmingham, and visited relatives in Virginia. Our ultimate goal was to arrive in Chautauqua, New York, on August 20th for Supreme Court week. We heard lectures by legal experts, authors, and Sandra Day O’Connor.
Chautauqua Institution is a not-for-profit, 750-acre community on Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York State. Approximately 7,500 people reside there on any day during the nine-week summer season. The Institution, originally the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly, was founded in 1874 as an educational experiment in out-of-school, vacation learning. It was successful and broadened almost immediately beyond courses for Sunday school teachers to include academic subjects, music, art, and physical education. Our unmapped journey towards New York State evolved into a search for Civil War Historical Markers after we discovered markers for Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, all part of the Battle for Chattanooga.
Our route took us to Washington & Lee University, a beautiful liberal arts college in Lexington, Virginia, Antietam, Harper’s Ferry, and Gettysburg. During our overnights in Gettysburg, we studied our route towards western New York State and our final destination. We discovered that we would be traveling near Frank Lloyd Wright’s renowned masterpiece, Falling Water, located near Pittsburgh. And, well, if we were going through Pittsburgh to Chautauqua, New York, we had to stop at Three Rivers Stadium to please the football lover in the family. After a week of lectures in Chautauqua, we ended our journey in Buffalo to see the magnificent Niagara Falls and to walk through the Frederick Olmsted-designed park.
The great joy of this road trip was seeing America the Beautiful unfolding ahead of us each day with constant surprises as we followed the path of the Allegheny Mountains.
My favorite hotels along the way: The Swag in Waynesville, North Carolina; Keswick Hall, near Charlottesville, Virginia; The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
