Earl and I have put our luggage away, stuffed our dirty clothes in the laundry hamper, and settled in to our regular chores. You’d hardly know we’d been away. Tomorrow, Monday, it’s back to the usual weekly routine with a return to the gym, my piano lesson, doctors’ appointments, and – yes – gainful employment with Fred Flare.

I’m sitting here enjoying the final hours of the weekend. A speckled bird pecks at the feeder just outside my window; and while he seems to get enough to eat he drops an equal amount on the ground. Earlier I saw another bird pulling a thread from our patio carpet, presumably for some cozy nest. I can’t imagine being a bird and doing everything from household construction to dining on sunflower seeds with my beak.

The crocheted lap robe I worked on in the car is spread on the floor. I have only one row to go to finish, and the next time I watch a television program it will be done.

Earl and I are going to cook together this afternoon. He bought a cookbook in Topeka, Kansas, home of the Eisenhower Presidential Library; and we’ve decided to make one of the recipes from it. I believe Ike’s mother made it first, and most likely it could be fodder (yes, pun intended) for tomorrow’s blog.

The tangible remains of our vacation are this cookbook, various brochures from other sites we visited, and – in a couple weeks – the credit card bill. But the real remains are the memories. Ah, the memories.

Last night Earl and I stayed at the only motel in Wentzville, Missouri. It was a Super 8, and was preceded by a conversation about the early years of Motel 6 and Super 8 as we covered I-70 heading to St. Louis.

We recalled that Motel 6 originally offered no-frills lodging for six dollars way back when. Then Super 8 came along and offered fancier lodging for two dollars more. We think this was in the sixties and seventies, because neither of us ever stayed at one of these chains.

But the sun was setting and we were tired, having spent the day chasing the shadows of Truman and Churchill across Missouri. Earlier in the day we’d been to Truman’s home in Independence, MO, and followed that with a visit to the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, MO.

We watched billboards for signs of possible lodging and finally settled at Exit 208 just before the rush into the St. Louis metropolitan area. Earl negotiated the room rate and obtained a local imprimatur on a restaurant for dinner. Then we found our room.

I will say it was Spartan. At the same time, it had everything the hotel before it had at half the price: a myriad of channels on a flat screen TV, Wi-Fi, breakfast in the morning, late check-out if needed, and USA Today. The bed sufficed too.

What I take away from this is the possibility that when we do our Great Plains Tour the summer of 2012, maybe we don’t need to spend as much money to have adequate lodging when it’s just for one night. And most of that is spent sleeping . . .

People of a certain age are familiar with the phrase, “the iron curtain.” It was coined by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, a small town that houses Westminster College in the middle of middle America. In fact, it’s so ‘middle’ that Earl and I had difficulty finding it.

The College is home to the National Churchill Museum, a truly inspiring homage to Sr. Winston. It comprises the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, a museum dedicated to the life of Churchill, and a portion of the Berlin Wall that Sir Winston’s granddaughter brought to the grounds. This brief description pales in the presence of the real things.

Where to begin? Well, I’d say you have to experience it yourself, especially if you are of that age that remembers the phrase, “the iron curtain.” The exact sentence in which this is said goes like this: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent…”

Churchill led his beloved England through the penultimate war to victory. But after that he saw the dangers of the future in the way the former allies worked together. Or didn’t work together. Russia, in particular, swallowed entire countries and limited not only their communication with the West but also their independent development. This is what Churchill meant by defining those countries as being behind an iron curtain.

That was more than sixty years ago, and the world has changed several times over since then. Churchill died in 1965 at the age of ninety-one without seeing the end to the iron curtain. But eventually, it came down as symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He would have been pleased.

This blog site is turning into a travelogue site since it seems the only time I’m inspired to blog is when Earl and I are traveling. This week finds us returning from the Memorial Day Weekend in Denver, Colorado.

We left Denver at six this morning headed east toward Kansas and then Missouri. Tonight we’re in a Holiday Inn Express in Topeka, having driven over five hundred miles. In between we visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and boyhood home in Abilene.

Normally, we drive from point A to point B, nonstop, hoping to make as much time as possible. Five hundred miles is an easy drive. But this trip we decided to try a different tactic. We agreed that if some billboard or local attraction beckoned to us, we would follow. So, on the way to Denver last week we stopped to see John Wayne’s birthplace in Winterset, Iowa, as well as some of the bridges made famous by The Bridges of Madison County. We also went to the Great Platte River Trail Archway Museum in Kearney, Nebraska, and Buffalo Bill Cody’s home in North Platte.

It’s a different approach to long distance travel, but we’ve found it most enjoyable. Tomorrow we hope to visit a college in Fulton, Missouri, where Winston Churchill once visited and is said to have coined the phrase, “iron curtain.” These two words probably don’t mean much to young people today, but Earl and I grew up in the era where they conjured a picture of brutality and Russian might. So we’re interested in seeing where they came from.

Traveling this way, meandering hither and yon, takes more time than traveling as the crow flies. But in the past week, we’ve gained a greater appreciation of the states we’ve been in and a greater appreciation of our country’s history.

This is the last day of our Florida vacation; tomorrow we pack and start the long trek home. We’ll leave behind balmy summer weather, blue seas, and conch fritters. I’ll miss the first two a lot.

We’ll take with us memories of the most relaxing trip ever, twelve days of swimming and reading and eating in about equal proportions. Hopefully our scale at home won’t be too shocked.

Would we do this again? The current consensus is yes. In fact, next time we’re considering driving instead of flying, staying longer to work on our tans, and bringing more reading material.

The only thing we’re not looking forward to is the upcoming blast of winter that’s supposed to hit Michigan on our return.