Five More Sites To Go Until I Win Wilbear Wright

Because it's not a road trip to pick the kids up from college if I'm not detouring to a different tourist site every 20 miles!

All the sites on the Dayton Aviation Trail have different and odd hours--seriously, I'm talking hours like "Wed-Thurs 9:30-4" or "Tues, Sat 10-12:30", for Pete's sake--so you will be unsurprised to learn that I literally sat down one day, looked up every site's open hours, and noted it on my official Dayton Aviation Trail brochure.

And that's how I learned that although the Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum's grounds are open during daylight hours, the office where the Dayton Aviation Trail stamp lives is only open during business hours on weekdays, so if I wanted my stamp from there--and I did!--then we needed to swing by on this road trip.

So we did!

The Wright family plot is lovely, and since it's in a typical American city you can park very near it and then just hop out of the car and walk over, making it the perfect quick stop when you're actually supposed to be going somewhere else that day, ahem.

I always like to see the mementos that people put on famous graves:

Can you see the broken shell there? This article says that there are visitors who particularly like to leave North Carolina shells on the Wright brothers' graves. 

Nearby, we found the grave of Paul Laurence Dunbar:

The poem chosen for his marker reads, in part, "Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass." We had the big kid with us for this leg, so she obligingly leaned over Dunbar's marker so that he could, for a moment, lay down beneath at least one "willer."

And then back in the car we hopped, because college move-out appointments wait for neither poets nor pilots!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!