When I was a kid, my parents insisted we were too poor to fly anywhere, so we took a lot of road trips. Mostly, we went from California to Illinois and back to visit family. I don’t remember a lot about these trips except they were pretty awesome despite the fact that that cars with no air conditioning sucked, cars driven by smokers sucked, having nothing but slowly diluting iced tea and peanut butter available for sustenance sucked, and having to fit myself into the passenger seat so the non-driving parent could sleep in the back seat kinda sucked. How could anything be awesome? Well, the conversations with the conscious parent were nice. Staring out the window was nice. My mom always bought a billion car puzzles to shut me up, and those were great. Eventually I learned to play word games with billboards and license plates, and that killed a lot of time.

But it was all interstate travel. Lots of billboards. Lots of other cars. No historic markers. I suppose my intro to those must have happened when we moved to Illinois ourselves and would take 2-lane highways from our house to visit family in other parts of the state, but I don’t remember them. The first time I remember noticing them was when I visited my grandparents in Virginia—historic markers are all over the dang place in that state!

The hubs and I now do a lot of travel like that, so we see a lot of those markers go by, and we go out of our way to see even more. And for a long time, we’d go, “Huh, I wonder what that was…” as one flashed past, but now there is an app for that! I almost never remember to mark the ones we speed past and I read aloud from my screen, but they are prolific. But if you asked me, “name a historic marker,” I would answer “Simon Kenton’s birthplace.”

Why? Because it was at an intersection on the way home in Virginia. We drove past it pretty much every day for 20 years. Who was Simon Kenton? Good question. He fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, ran around with Daniel Boone, did a bunch of frontier stuff, and died in Ohio.

The hubs, who has a much better head for such things, is partial to a Lincoln County War marker in New Mexico that notes the site of John H. Tunstall’s murder (sort of—the marker describes how Tunstall was shot “at a nearby site,” which is accessible only by driving on unpaved Forest Service roads).

Do you have a favorite marker?