Busy Summer Travel

Hello everyone and welcome back to The Hogue Connection! We’ve had a lot of busy summer travel and I’m finally ready to sit down and do some more genealogy work. In addition to me finishing up my autobiography on Storyworth, Jane and I have been busy hauling our travel trailer around the greater PNW, visiting friends and family along the way.

In addition to camping out for about 40 nights, we had a couple of other trips, without the trailer, tucked in between those trips. We spent 4 days up on the Hood Canal at Brinnon, WA, with the kids and grand kids, which was a blast. Another trip, one that is much more important to this space, was going back to Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina for five days. We traveled 4500 miles by plane, 500 miles by car, and 40 miles by boat in that short period of time. Busy summer travel indeed!

Our Friends and Baseball

Our long-time great friends from Reno, Betsy and Lawson Fox, met Jane and I in San Francisco back in 2019. We went to visit the city and attend a Giants baseball game at Oracle Park. Betsy is not really a Giants fan; her team is the Atlanta Braves. We’ve had an ongoing rivalry between us and our favorite teams for a couple of decades now. All in good fun, most of the time. Anyway, Betsy suggested we do the same this year and meet up in San Francisco again. This time, though, when the Braves were in town. We took a look at our busy summer travel calendar and found we were already committed to a camping trip that weekend. However, I noticed the Giants were playing the Braves the weekend before in Atlanta. I suggested we fly back together to catch a game at Truist Park.

Betsy was both surprised and excited about my idea and we started to discuss plans. Lawson’s sister and brother-in-law, Shauna and Bill Oden, live on a lake near Loudon, TN. So, after inviting ourselves to stay at their place, we decided to fly into Knoxville on Wednesday, August 16^th. We’d catch the Friday night game, and fly back to Portland, OR on Sunday. Betsy’s birthday (it’s a round number and fairly monumental) was on that Thursday. We hung out on the lake that day and rested up a bit from our busy summer travel day. I worked with Lawson and came up with route for our trip.

The ”Braves and Graves” Tour

Betsy came up with the theme of our trip. We knew it was about three hours travel time to the ball park. We could make some stops along the way and still get there in plenty of time. Leaving Shauna and Bill’s about 10:00 AM, would put us at Stop #1 on the map, near Chatsworth, GA around lunch. This is the area of Murray county that my Hogues lived in between 1842 and 1859. We visited the home site of my fourth great grandfather, Julius Bates, here. We also tried to find his family cemetery, but couldn’t get to it. More on that in a subsequent post.

Stop #2 was Truist Park. We spent the night in a hotel a shuttle ride away. The game didn’t go well for the Giants, though, with the Braves winning 4-0. It was a pretty nice park and all, with a huge amount of sensory input via gigantic electronic scoreboards everywhere. They also would shoot off fireworks if their pitcher struck someone out. Unfortunately, that happened to 11 Giants, so fireworks were going off all the time.

Heading Back Through Stecoah

Stop #3 was at the Panther Creek Cemetery on the way back to Loudon on Saturday. It was beautiful there, and except for a neighbor’s barking dog, quite a pleasant stop. More on that in another post. At Stop #4 in Stecoah, NC, we visited Stecoah Creek and the Hazie Brown Cemetery. Our attempts to locate the Crisp Family Cemetery were unsuccessful. Some of the cemeteries are located on private property accessed through small private roads. It makes exploring a little unnerving in unfamiliar territory.

It was getting a little late, so we decided to make Stop #5 on the way to the airport on Sunday. We did get to drive on the famous Highway US 129 on the back. This road includes the famous “Tail of the Dragon” section that has 318 curves in only 11 miles. You read more about that here . It was a quick trip, but we had a lot of fun. Beautiful county back there! It was exciting for me to see the homeland of my ancestors. Look for my observations on that in future posts.

I wanted to use this brief travelogue to set the stage for my next four posts here at The Hogue Connection. You can look for those soon! I’ll dive deeper into the stops on our final busy summer travel route soon. Thanks for visiting my blog! Thanks, too, to Shauna and Bill Oden for being excellent hosts! You can return to the Home page here.