When we started planning this trip it was going to be an epic month-long trip through Americana that would be full of relaxation and good food. It occurred to us several months later that June 2026 was the month before our nation’s 250 birthday, and that we had inadvertently laced ourselves through some prime RevWar (that’s what locals call it) territory at a time when final preparations would be nearly finished and the big birthday party would be spinning up to full speed. This gave our trip a purpose, and that made the planning and the preparation all the more fun and special. Just like we named our big cross-country trip in 2022 “The Big Z” (after the shape of the route), we christened this one “Salute to 250” and set some goals for each stop to include digging down locally to find lesser-known heroes and events from the Revolutionary War that go far beyond the snapshot of this historical era that was dished out in school. With only slightly less detail, the school version was basically: “A bunch of guys wrote the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a guy rode a horse down a road in Boston, a shot was heard round the world, some pretty bloody wars were fought, and Cornwallis surrendered the British side in Yorktown. Yay America! Now, on to the Spanish American War……”

We scratched the surface a little more during our research and found that there is a rich fabric of events and heroes, each just as important to our freedom as the main events, in hundreds of towns in and around Colonial America, and our purpose on this trip was to find as many as we could as a way of celebrating the 250 years it took for a ragged bunch of oppressed pioneers to design and create the most powerful nation on earth.

As we set out, staring at gas prices that are bumping $5 a gallon (our rig gets about 7 mpg under tow), and realizing that the red, white and blue wardrobe we packed might not be universally accepted everywhere we go, we are reminded that our forefathers had things much harder, and significantly bleaker, when they formed their rag-tag guerilla militias and set off marching many of the same roads we will drive. So, we journey ahead in search of the artifacts and echoes of one of the most significant struggles in the history of man, the American Revolution.

Onward.