What’s in a name?

very vocal that morning, she told me, as they finished hunting and gathered the pack together. The penny dropped—not raucous youths, but the coyotes calling out to each other! I wished I had realised at the time.

The welcome you find on arrival at your chosen B&B usually sets the scene. There are often home-made cookies, snacks and a drink waiting, and the question “red or white?” is always a good sign! In many homes, along with recommendations of where to eat dinner, there is an instruction not to order dessert but to “come back and have it here,” always on the house. Generosity is not confined to food. Barbara, a fabulous, multi-talented artist whose B&B near Austin, Texas, was a blaze of colour and intricate designs, was also a qualified masseuse, and worked wonders on my back. The next day, she gave us tickets to tour a Bourbon distillery that was on our route, and a couple of ponchos as it had started to rain. I have used mine at Glastonbury since, a lovely memory of a truly free spirited, generous and unforgettable lady.

We are grateful for the many extra experiences that have come our way due to the passion the B&B hosts have for their businesses, and their kindness, as they welcome us into their homes. We also love to hear of their lives outside of their business, their various reasons for opening their homes and what their “real” jobs have been—a few surprises there! We have met and become friends with other guests too, and are still in touch with some of them.

A view of the USA

My husband was asked to welcome an American lady over here on a job exchange. When this lady went home we received an open invitation to visit. She changed jobs frequently with the result that we were lucky enough to see a great deal of the US.

We visited Massachusetts, Maine, Florida, Seattle, California, Iowa, Arizona, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, New Orleans and Wyoming, mainly using rental cars. When driving in America one is overwhelmed by the wide expanses of sky and land. We saw prairie, ranches, deserts, mesas, rivers, and hills and mountains. The most memorable visits were to the canyons.

Kodachrome Basin has a quiet majesty of its own with large sandstone weather-sculpted shapes, and a magical stillness. Yellowstone has large geysers and pools turned multicoloured by their dissolved rock salts. The whole area is volcanically active. Yosemite is also magical, with a river running below El Capitan and high waterfalls cascading down steep cliffs. Zion is a spectacle, with an attractive river bounded by high cliffs and its own eco-system. Bryce Canyon challenges the imagination with its hoodoos. These are a myriad of sandstone columns shaped by the elements. We drove from there up to Cedar Breaks and experienced a sharp drop in temperature as we climbed the 3,000m elevation.

We visited many cities but my interest lies outside them. America is a pluralist, multicultural society which makes it fascinating. A result of this is that the architecture is rich in variety as one travels. One area was very Germanic, others colonial, and others French.

There is always a darker side to any country. We saw Mexicans working bent double tending crops in extreme heat. Native Americans sold jewellery from stalls set up at the side of the road. In Miami we attended a wedding. En route to the venue in Coral Gables we were instructed to keep our car doors locked as we passed close to a run-down area.

In one place we experienced what it is to be other. Taking one of my shortcuts we drove for miles through a Navajo reservation. We stopped at a small store to buy something. Unfriendly looks and blank expressions made us feel very uncomfortable.

My favourite memory is of seeing a moose. I got overexcited following directly in the fresh hoofmarks of a moose going to a lake. We saw black bears, bison, (I brought home a cuddly toy one}, whales, marmots, prairie dogs, chipmunks, a groundhog, eagles, geese and pelicans.

A strange coincidence of names led to a memorable journey for Liz Lewis of Leicester South NWR.

When Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801, the eastern boundary of the United States was the Atlantic and the western boundary was the Mississippi River. One of Jefferson’s ambitions was to explore the territory on the west side of the Mississippi River, then owned by the French. He hoped to find a navigable route to the coast which could be used for trade. At that time, half the goods shipped from the US had to pass through the port of New Orleans, which was in this French territory, known as the Louisiana Territory.

In 1803 Napoleon, deep in debt, offered the entire territory, 830,000 square miles, to the US for $15m, thus almost doubling the size of the country for less than three cents an acre. The Louisiana Purchase is considered one of the most important events in the founding of the US, although the acquisition was nominal as France only actually controlled a fraction of the area, most of it being inhabited by native American Indians. Jefferson was now able to realise his ambition and send an expedition to the west. He chose his private secretary Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead it. Lewis then chose his close friend Second Lieutenant William Clark to accompany him. They gathered a group of 33 men, the Corps of Discovery, at Camp Wood near St Louis. They

Dorothy Paynter Beverley & District NWR

were issued with supplies, goods for trading with the Indians, scientific and medical instruments and the all-important notebooks in which to record flora, fauna and other information.

On 14 May 1804 the Corps of Discovery set out in a keel boat and two pirogues under Clark’s command. Lewis joined the expedition at St Charles on 21 May. They proceeded along the Missouri River until October when they decided to set up camp for the winter. The camp was named Fort Mandan after a nearby tribe of friendly Mandan Indians.

In April 1805 the expedition left Fort Mandan and “proceeded on”—a phrase frequently used by Lewis in his diaries—into completely uncharted territory. They were now travelling in the two pirogues and six dug-out canoes, the keelboat being too big to continue. Over the next one and a half years they would travel a total of 8,000 miles to the Pacific and back again to St Louis, at times enduring extreme hardship.

Although the Northwest Passage was not found the expedition was significant in the fields of science, botany and trade, and travel to the Pacific coast became possible.

In 1996 we visited America with our good friends the Clark family. Several times we saw signs pointing out the Lewis and Clark Trail. We had no idea who they were but, because of the coincidence of names, we decided to investigate further. Every American school child knows the story of Lewis and Clark but little is known about them over here. As we discovered more, it seemed that the inevitable next step would be to follow the Lewis and Clark trail ourselves.

After a great deal of planning, we set out in September 2004, which coincided with the start of bicentennial celebrations of the original journey. Our aim was to travel south then west to the Pacific coast where Lewis and Clark overwintered in 1805–6. We flew to Fargo, North Dakota and picked up our very comfortable SUV—no canoes for us! Our first stop was Fort Mandan. We proceeded on visiting many Interpretive Centers and significant landmarks before reaching the Pacific Coast. The Interpretive Centers were all very informative and some had been specially built for the bicentennial celebrations.

We attracted a lot of attention on these visits. Our friend Sue is very artistic and had produced baseball caps and T-shirts with the words “Lewis and Clark follow Lewis and Clark” or “We proceeded on…”. People were amazed by the coincidence of the names and we were given a very warm welcome wherever we went.

The trip really whetted our appetites and so September 2006 saw us once again flying in to Fargo, but this time heading south and then east to complete the second half of the original journey. Our aim was to be in St Louis two hundred years to the day after Lewis and Clark returned.

People were amazed by the coincidence of the names

Sue had once again been busy and had discovered that a group of re-enactors had been following the exact route that the Corps of Discovery had taken, travelling in canoes, on horseback and on foot and wearing the clothes that the Corps would have worn.

Each night they camped by the Missouri and were entertained by the local people. We coincided with them in several places but the most memorable was in Jefferson City, where we were invited to spend the evening with them. They were equally fascinated by what we were doing. At the end of the evening various people were recognised for the help they had given the re-enactors, and we were extremely honoured to be presented with medals because we had travelled the furthest to be there.

When we reached St Louis on 23 September, the banks of the Missouri were crowded with people. It was amazing to see the canoes coming into sight exactly two hundred years since Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery had returned. There were many speeches welcoming the re-enactors and acclaiming the achievements of Lewis and Clark, and a statue was unveiled to commemorate the occasion.

Our two Lewis and Clark journeys have left us with amazing memories. I think they were the ultimate in themed holidays!