{Road Trip} Day Two - Oh, Buffalo...

Today we covered a good bit of ground, booking it up to Buffalo, NY for the day...  Let's just call this our "Alamo" for this year's trip...  It wasn't in the original plan, but when we realized how close (to clarify, "close" on a road trip is more like..."Oh, the Grand Canyon is only 4 hours away, we HAVE to swing by!") we'd be, we decided to check it out.

The Buffalo area is home to several presidential sites related to both President Millard Fillmore, and sadly, President William McKinley, as well.

Our first stop was a bit of a bust, and I was pretty disappointed.  I might have even shed a couple tears...  If it is a site that can be toured and we don't tour it (or at least step foot inside), we don't count it.  This is serious stuff...  Having cut out an earlier morning stop in order to make it to East Aurora, NY in time to tour the Millard Fillmore House, but getting delayed yet again with road work on the interstate, we arrived at 3:40, and no one was there...  Like it was locked up with no sign of life...  Mind you, the posted hours were 1:00-4:00pm...  

 

Sooo, someone should've been there, even if we were too late for a full on tour, right?  I called the number listed on the website (I had emailed earlier in the day) and no one could come give us a tour...  Darn it...  Like when are we going to be back in East Aurora, NY again?  Ummm, I'm going to guess, never?

Oh well...  We peeked inside...

 

sat on the porch and watched Mo Rocca's account of Millard Fillmore and his house...

 

 

and toured the gardens...

{B captured this shot!}

With that, we said see ya to East Aurora, and headed on over to Buffalo...

In Buffalo, we visited the sites of two of President Fillmore's homes.  The Franklin Street site is now home to a school...

and the Delaware Street site in Niagara Square now looks to be either a hotel or an apartment building, and is currently undergoing some construction...

Lastly, we visited President Fillmore's grave in Forest Lawn Cemetery...

President William McKinley, one of the "Ohio Presidents", was assassinated and died in Buffalo, NY.

In 1901, while attending the Pan-American Exposition, President McKinley was shot at the Temple of Music.  A plaque marks the spot where it once stood...

President McKinley was taken to the nearby Milburn House where he died about a week later.  A marker is all that remains of the Milburn House today...

 {Leapfrog did find a four leaf clover in the area underneath the sign!}


Ending on a happy note, we swung by the Buffalo Bills stadium on the way out of town.  We do love our local Clemson boys, Sammy Watkins and the newly drafted, Shaq Lawson...

Maybe we will be back someday after all...

 More presidents (and vice presidents, too) on tap for tomorrow...

More {Road Trip} 2016 Fun

Day One - Kicking it Off in Kentucky, Ohio Presidential I and Charleston, West Virginia

Day Three - Ohio Presidential II and Columbus, Ohio

Day Four - Ohio Presidential III + A Little Football

Day Five - Ohio Presidential IV

Day Six - Ohio Presidential V + State #40!

Day Seven - Soo Locks and Mackinac Island

Day Eight - Sleeping Bear and President Ford

Day Nine - Lansing, Michigan and The Henry Ford

Day Ten - The VPs of Indiana and HOME!

{Road Trip} Day One - Kicking it Off in Kentucky, Ohio Presidential I and Charleston, West Virginia

After driving through the night, we arrived in Kentucky early Saturday morning.  President Lincoln provided a big, colorful welcome!

We made our first thrilling stop at the birthplace of David Rice Atchison...  Yeah, I hadn't heard of him either...  Well, that is until a couple of weeks ago...  President Atchison (yes, that's what I said) was born in 1807 in Frogtown, KY ~ right here on this site near the Fresh Market...

He's famous for a (supposedly) weird glitch where President Polk's term ended and President Taylor refused to be sworn in on a Sunday, making him (as President pro tempore) President for the gap in between.

Obviously this is quite a controversial subject...

I'm not so sure that I buy it...  In fact I'm about 99.3% sure that I don't, but I'm a completist, and so we stop...


We grabbed breakfast to go from North Lime Coffee & Donuts...

and while they may not look all that snazzy, these things were YUM!

After that we tracked down the sites related to Vice President John C. Breckinridge...  So, we haven't had enough to do with just hunting down our U.S. Presidents, and after visiting the birthsite of VP John C. Calhoun earlier this month, we officially added VP sites to our list of places to hunt down...

This could have the makings of a pretty good college admission essay one day, but only time will tell...  In the meantime, we'll keep plugging along here and adding random sites, I mean more "material", to our ever growing database of Presidential (and now Vice Presidential) sites...

John C. Breckinridge served as the 14th Vice President of the United States under President James Buchanan.

He was born near Lexington, KY at his family's estate, Thorn Hill, in 1821.  The Thorn Hill home is long gone, and this is what the property looks like today...

VP Breckinridge died at his home in Lexington, KY in1875...

and is buried in Lexington Cemetery...

With that, we bid goodbye to Vice President Breckinridge and went to Frankfort, KY in search of Richard Mentor Johnson.  Johnson served as the 9th Vice President of the United States under President Martin Van Buren.

VP Johnson died in Frankfort, KY (no clue where, so we're going with the city sign)...

and is buried in Frankfort Cemetery...

not too far away from Daniel Boone...  We all jumped out and visited Daniel Boone, because well, it's Daniel Boone...

 

 

{a little group selfie action overlooking the Kentucky State Capitol ~ we've already run up those steps}

From Frankfort, we continued on to what is now Jefferson County, KY.  VP Johnson was born in the "Beargrass" settlement, part of Virginia when he was born in 1780, but near present day Louisville, KY today (we're going with the county sign on this one)...

 

Done with our packed morning in Kentucky, we crossed over into O-HI-O, and a BRAND NEW STATE for the littles ~ that's #39!


{insert OHIO pic here}

 First in our "Ohio Presidential" series...  President William Howard Taft...

Birthsite - Cincinnati, OH ~ President Taft was born here in 1858...

 

 

"The Quarry" Home (private) - Cincinnati, OH...

 

and President Ulysses S. Grant...

 Birthsite - Point Pleasant, OH ~ President Grant was born here in 1822...

Boyhood Home - Georgetown, OH...

 {in President Grant's boyhood bedroom}

From Cincinnati, we continued on to Charleston, WV to run up some state capitol building steps!

Charleston, WV 
West Virginia State Capitol
B's 31st set of state capitol steps scaled...
#capitolstepschallenge

We capped off the night with dinner at Black Sheep Burrito & Brews...

Phew, I'm about presidented out, and we're just getting started here in Ohio!

More presidents on tap for tomorrow...

More {Road Trip} 2016 Fun

Day Two - Oh, Buffalo...

Day Three - Ohio Presidential II and Columbus, Ohio

Day Four - Ohio Presidential III + A Little Football

Day Five - Ohio Presidential IV

Day Six - Ohio Presidential V + State #40!

Day Seven - Soo Locks and Mackinac Island

Day Eight - Sleeping Bear and President Ford

Day Nine - Lansing, Michigan and The Henry Ford

Day Ten - The VPs of Indiana and HOME!

Ready to Road Trip! {2016 edition}

{www.adventureinyou.com}

Stay tuned...

 {Road Trip} 2015 - A Look Back at LAST Year

Day One - From Running Up Stairs to Painting Cars

Day Two - New Mexico

Day Three - A Canyon, a Dam, and a Whole Lotta Lights

Day Four - Vegas By Day and a Surprise at Night

Day Five - DisneyLAND - Day 1

Day Six - DisneyLAND - Day 2

Day Seven - DisneyLAND - Day 3

Day Eight - Desert Driving, Waving to Mexico, and Night Swimming Under the Fireworks

Day Nine - LBJ Ranch and Austin, TX

Day Ten - Another Stop in Baton Rouge and HOME!

Welcome to The Ambitious Odometer!

~ for the most recent trip post, click here ~

Welcome to The Ambitious Odometer!

 {at the TRUE Center of the Nation - in the middle of a cow pasture in very rural South Dakota - in 2014}

I haven't always loved a good road trip.  I remember long car rides as a child, road tripping from my home state of Georgia down to Mississippi (to visit one set of grandparents) + up to Pennsylvania (to visit the other set of grandparents), and what seemed like the never-ending state of Virginia, that I didn't so much appreciate when I was little...  Beautiful green landscapes with very few billboards used to equal BORING.  These days, I have really come to appreciate not only the state of Virginia, but all of the others, as well.

My husband and I both love to travel and have always been ones to make the most of wherever we go.  When we got married, we'd both traveled overseas (him more often than me) and had each visited about half of the 50 states give or take.  We've always loved an adventure, and talking about all of the places we'd like to go (one day) was part of what brought us together.  Our honeymoon, planned entirely by my husband, consisted of a few days in Rome, a few days in Paris, and a metro ticket for the days in between...so that we could choose together where we wanted to visit.  It was so much fun deciding where we wanted to go each day, mapping our course, and finding a place to stay on the fly.  All said and done, we hit Milan, Torino, and Bergamo, Italy.

{ice skating in Bergamo, Italy - December 2003}

Once we had children, we made kind of an unspoken promise to each other, to travel as a family to all 50 states, ensuring that our 3 children would visit each state, before they graduate from high school.  And...  When I say "visit", I mean visit... We're talking - diners, museums, national parks, world's biggest (insert whatever noun here) on the side of the road...  You get the picture...

Somewhere along the way, our son got very interested in our U.S. Presidents, and then in U.S. State Capitol Buildings, too...

Fueled by all of the above, plus my affinity for a schedule (like a typed up and printed on actual paper type of thing), so far we've traveled to 38 states as a family of 5 (with 2 new states on tap for this summer) - all by car...  Yes, I just said that...  In fact, 2 of our 3 children have never even been on a plane before!

I tell you...  I really do believe that getting there is half the fun!

By road tripping around the country, coast to coast, I've come to realize how truly beautiful our country is, and just how diverse and unique its landscape is.  I love America so much and sincerely hope to instill a deep appreciation of it in our children, as well.  There really are enough adventures to fill up more than a few lifetimes right HERE!

So, as you can probably already tell, I have an ongoing love affair with my odometer, setting it every time we embark on a new adventure...   I'm also known for maybe being just a teensy bit ambitious with my itineraries (remember those paper things that I print?)!  One of my dear friends once said (in response to my planned NYC stops - with 3 kids 7 and under at the time), "You do realize that, as it stands right now, you have us hitting 4 of the 5 NYC boroughs all in one day!"  I think we ended up taking like 6 types of transportation that day, too!  You can read all about that crazy day here...

The Ambitious Odometer serves as a collection of our family's day, weekend and summer road trips of both near and far, categorized accordingly -> {All In a Day}, {Weekend Adventure} and {Road Trip}, plus {Spring Break} and other {Summer FUN} trips both near and far, too...

So, buckle up and settle in, we've got some adventuring to do!

Please note:  Posts written prior to this have been relocated here from our family blog, and here is the first post I wrote there that began to explain the history of our love of presidents, capitol steps, and traveling the USA + what's behind our family road trip itineraries...

{Summer FUN} Vice President John C. Calhoun Birthsite - Abbeville, SC

Feeling that we were overdue for a little adventure, this morning I took the littles on a short trip to the birthsite of John C. Calhoun, right here in our home state of South Carolina.

John C. Calhoun served as the 7th Vice President of the United States under Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.

He was born near Abbeville, SC in 1782.  We found the marker in Abbeville County near the McCormick County line...

With this, I'd say that the birthsites and graves of our U.S. Vice Presidents are officially added to our growing list of places to visit...

That should keep us busy for awhile!

{Summer FUN} Beauvoir

Our first little adventure of the summer took us down to the Gulf Coast to visit family...

We took our time on the trip down, deciding to follow the road less traveled, making a stop in the Rosemary Beach part of Florida.  The favorite stop of the littles???

The Sugar Shak, of course!

The next day we made a stop in Biloxi, MS at a home I've driven by multiple times, but had yet to walk inside...

 

Beauvoir was the last home of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy.  Davis died while on a trip to New Orleans in 1889...

What a beautiful home.  It's a miracle to me that it survived Hurricane Katrina...

Our trip was cut short as this little bit came down with the FLU!