Manzanar

One of the things I've always written about in all of my blogs are trips that I take that I find significant.  Back in 2017, I went on a 16 state road trip with my youngest and yet, for some strange reason, never chronicled that trip in any way, shape or form, outside of some photos that I posted to Facebook. I will attempt to rectify that over the course of the next couple of months as I share some of the photography from that trip and some of the places we visited along the way.

Originally, the two of us had thought about taking a trip to Yellowstone National Park that particular summer.  We had discussed it casually in the fall of the year before but hadn't really solidified anything, so it sort of stayed on the back burner.  Then in February of 2017, my father-in-law passed away and the family had to sort out his house and deal with the things that you have to deal with when a grandparent/parent dies.  There were several pieces of artwork that my wife's sister particularly wanted. The question was how to get it back to her in Wisconsin.  That's where the idea of this 16 day road trip was spawned.

We started planning our route out and once the planning had been done, I then started looking for places we could camp each night.  It was then my son pointed out the errors of my thought process by pointing out, that with all of the extra stuff we were taking back to Wisconsin with us, we wouldn't have any room in the Jeep for camping equipment.  Yeah, I'd sort of forgotten that the Jeep is a little bit smaller than our former minivan that we'd used on previous camping trips.

So we ended up staying most of the time in motels along the way. As with all of our road trips, geocaching is involved and so there were several goals attached to that end of the trip as well.  Getting different kinds of geocaches in each state we passed through, finding a geocache in every county we passed through in Nevada.  If we played our cards right, we'd have the entire state covered at the end.

So the trip started and we drove north on Hwy 395 through the Owens Valley up the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, stopping for lunch, stopping for gas and stopping once again at Manzanar National Historic Site. I say, once again, because every time I head north along Hwy 395, I stop there.  The historical importance of this "Relocation Center" cannot be stressed enough.  Over 110,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to 10 different camps in the Western United States during World War II, ostensibly because of their race and who we were fighting in the war.  The premise that was given by our own government was that it was for the protection of the people in the camps.  If that was the case, why were the guns pointed inward at the camps?  I'll let that sink in a little.

The first time I visited, I was 19 years old and had no idea what Manzanar was all about.  I made sure each of my children visited the place at least once.  This should never happen again in our country.  Ever.