great takes on family travel in the U.S.

From guest blogger Linda Moore, of Raven’s Roads.

Lately, I’ve been on a data entry jag. Specifically, I’m entering the title and location of numerous historic landmarks, and as I do so my mind takes me off on flights of fancy across the United States, imagining what it would be like to visit towns called Neenah and Cleveland and Hundred.

Questions fill my mind. Might I possibly visit them all? What about all the county towns? How come 95% of all county courthouses can be found in Courthouse Square? And what are there a hundred of in Hundred?

Across the country, historical markers dot the landscape, and designated landmarks store local heritage in their wood and stone. The signs and plaques tell stories: tales of transcontinental travel, of ancient ruins, of the discovery of plutonium. Finding such sites has been my passion since 2003.

It all started with two broken gears.

Imagine, if you will, a woman who was returning to motorcycling after an absence of several years. She was doing a treasure hunt to find and photograph her bike with historical markers, and was using this game as training for a long solo tour of the Southwest.

She had learned, as part of this adventure, that historical markers were not always to be found where the guide books said they were. Sometimes, you see, they move around at night.

My planned trip ended with a jolt, two days before I was due to depart: first and fourth gears had mysteriously broken, and that was the end of that. I had a huge amount of left-over energy that had to go somewhere, and hatched the idea of visiting all of California’s state historic landmarks. After all, if the bike were not reliable enough to do a long trip, it might be able to manage numerous shorter trips.

I decided to document this search so that others could get accurate information about the landmarks’ locations, an idea that lasted until after I went poking around online and discovered that every state in the USA had some kind of landmark or marker system. There are city and county markers, too-if you live on the East Coast, for example, you can’t walk more than about three inches without tripping over some kind of plaque.

There was no way I could restrict this site just to California. Markeroni, the Gentle Art of Landmark-Snarfing was born in August 2003, and now there are over 90,000 landmarks in the database just waiting for someone to log them.

Markeroni a resource site for finding historical markers and historic landmarks, and provides a place to log one’s visits to such sites. “Snarf” is a programmers’ term which means “to download data rapidly for later processing”–which is exactly what happens every time you visit a historical marker.

I set up the site with tongue firmly in cheek. Camera-shy members can upload pictures of their mascot at the marker. Penguins, flamingos and fluffy dice perch in front of old schoolhouses, forts and county courthouses. No longer is history about dusty archives, though members who start as simple treasure hunters report more frequent visits to museums and a growing fascination with history.

Each trip brings with it a new story, and sometimes the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle click into place in completely unexpected ways. A year or so back, a friend took me to a statue of Reuel Colt Gridley in Stockton, California. Here was a man who’d raised thousands of dollars for veterans’ health care by selling the same bag of flour over and over again.

But this was not our first meeting. Not too many weeks beforehand I’d been in Austin, Nevada, photographing Gridley’s original store. Suddenly, the story took on a whole new dimension. While each marker might seem to be an individual, isolated snapshot of history, it isn’t. It’s part of an interconnected web of events and landmarks that can be discovered by any traveler who is willing to stop, and take a moment to read.

Once you start to join the dots, it’s too late. You’re hooked, and history will never be the same again.

When I’m not tracking down markers to their lair or running the Markeroni site, I’m an avid motorcyclist, freelance writer, author of the travel book “A Little Twist of Texas” and a prolific blogger.

Photo of London Wall courtesy of TCM and Markeroni.