August 20, 2008

August 20, 2008

The morning is spent traveling across Pennsylvania into Ohio. The trip is made longer by a wrong turn that causes us to go pretty far down the Penn Turnpike till we find an exit to turn around. Wrong turns get expensive with $4 gas driving a gas-sucking motorhome. After lunch we roll into Canton, OH finding the First Ladies National Historic Site. It turns out to be a big ball of worthless fluff. They have an old house that was a former home of Mrs. William McKinley. We pass on the home tour as it is one more old house. We proceed over to the Educational Center for a two-minute guided tour of nothing. They have a tiny collection; a few dresses, a handful of presidential plates, some campaign buttons, and as a special traveling exhibit, several papier-mâché presidential pets. I figured ahead of time it was going to bore me, but even Aimee thought it useless. They don’t even have a list of all the First Ladies. A sorry excuse for a national park site.

The only redeeming benefit is we learned William McKinley was from Canton. Directions in hand we drove across town to his Memorial. It is huge and vaguely familiar, looking like a slightly smaller version of Grant’s Tomb. McKinley, former governor of Ohio was elected president in 1896. Shortly after the start of his second term, he was assassinated in Buffalo by an anarchist and succeeded by his VP, Teddy Roosevelt.

We spend the night at a park outside Akron, OH.