Thoughts on a road trip to the Ark Encounter and other places

Last October Gary and Beverly Jensen, traveling companions from Chester on several prior bus tours, called asking if I would help them organize a bus tour. The destination was the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati. I'd heard of the two attractions and learned the Ark and Museum were based on a 'young earth creation' view of the story found in the Bible.

The Jensons contacted Diamond Tours, a travel company that specializes in trips for seniors, and reserved an eleven-day Ark Encounter trip for late September, 2023. My wife and I agreed we would like to help with the tour and visit the Ark and the Museum. The centerpiece of the two facilities, a life-sized Noah's ark built to the specifications spelled out in the Bible, seemed interesting enough to justify a visit. And there was much more to see on the tour.

By the time we signed on the bus was basically full with folks from the Chester area and connected friends from as far away as Idaho and Oregon. We traveled 3500+ miles to get to the Cincinnati area and back plus shorter trips to the attractions, hotels and eating places along the way. Here are some highlights from the 11-day bus tour.

Heading east from Chester with a pickup stop in Chinook

By mid-morning of a Friday in late September 40 passengers were on the tour bus and headed east from Chester and Chinook. We made a lunch stop in Glasgow, the last town of any size before Williston, North Dakota. We stopped in Williston for our evening meal and spent the first night in Watford City, a town still very much a part of oil production in northwest North Dakota.

Day 2 we crossed the state of North Dakota (lots of corn, soy beans, sunflowers and baled hay) with a stop at the museum complex in Dickinson and a visit to the world's largest buffalo visible from I-94 in Jamestown, ND. The second night we stayed in Fargo, ND, a prairie town that is now a boom town and still growing.

From Fargo we headed to our third overnight stop in Madison, Wisconsin, the state capitol and home to the University of Wisconsin. Our lunch stop on Day 3 was the Mall of America in a suburb of the Twin Cities in Minnesota-500+ shops and stores in a complex covering the equivalent of 78 football fields. It has a full-blown carnival inside with a roller coaster, Ferris wheel and its own zip code.

My wife and I had lunch at an Israeli food booth and found the two hours we had allotted to the mall more than adequate to see what we really needed to see. That evening, before arriving at the hotel, we had dinner in the Wisconsin Dells, a famous summer tourist destination, mostly quiet this time of year.

On the fourth day we passed close enough to Chicago to make out the downtown skyline and then drove through Indianapolis. Never saw even one sign to the famed speedway. Arrived at the Cincinnati hotel after 8pm (and a change from Central to Eastern time). Unlike some river cities (Cincinnati's on the Ohio River) that are on flat flood plains both the Kentucky and Ohio sides of the river are very hilly with lots of hardwood trees, none of which had any fall colors when we arrived.

We did the Ark, the Museum and enjoyed other sights in the Cincinnati area

On the fifth day we headed for the Ark Encounter. It's on an 800-acre plot of land about 50 miles south of Cincinnati in northern Kentucky. The attraction is designed to handle large crowds but we did the Ark on a 'slow day' with only 3,000 people there. Our bus dropped us off at the entrance (most visitors parked in outlying areas and took a shuttle to the entrance).

The Ark did not disappoint. Built with 3.3 million board feet of spruce framing and pine exterior siding, the vessel is 510 feet long, 85 feet wide and 51 feet tall (three decks). This boat was built by Amish builders using "traditional timber framing techniques." The project took 18 months to complete and involved 1,000 craftsmen. Scholars believe it took Noah, his family and hired hands 75-100 years to complete the ark described in the Bible.

Visitors access the various decks via wide, sloping ramps. Each deck is filled with exhibits relating to the ark and the great flood. Upper decks have examples of pens for the animals and examples of pots, sacks and boxes that were used for provisions for Noah's family and the animals.

Some animals in the exhibits had certain 'dinosaur' characteristics, much different from the giraffes, elephants and zebras used in current kids' books to illustrate what the 'two by two' animals might have looked like. While no one really knows what the ark looked like or how it was laid out, the exhibits seem credible and do help viewers get a feel for how the ark might have been.

Day 6 of the tour we went to the Creation Museum. This is a slightly older attraction in a different location, built by the same people who did the Ark. The Creation Museum has a more laid-back feel, less of the 'amusement park' layout of the Ark Encounter. There's a main building where most of the exhibits are located. The main building sits beside a large man-made lake that is surrounded with all sorts of gardens and varied plantings. A crew was busy stringing lights for the winter holidays and photos showed the grounds aglow during past Christmas seasons.

The exhibits all had to do with how the world started through the 'young earth' perspective: "Young Earth Creationists adopt a method of Biblical interpretation which requires that the earth be no more than 10,000 years old, and that the six days of creation described in Genesis each lasted for 24 hours." (source: baptistnews.com). Not all Christians necessarily agree with this view of creation. I found the creationist view interesting. However, I believe God created and God is still in control, the "how of creation" to me is really just details.

On our last day in Cincinnati (#7) we spent a long morning at the Museum Center which included an Omnimax theater (where we saw a multi-media showing about the national park system), a museum devoted to local history, a natural history museum and a holocaust museum-the latter based on interviews with locals who survived Nazi concentration camps and/or escaped Nazi controlled portions of Europe. All the museums were housed in a beautifully restored art deco train station built in 1931.

That afternoon we took a tour aboard a paddlewheel boat on the Ohio River. It was a perfect day with mild temperatures and sunny skies. Much of downtown Cincinnati, including both the Bengals' football stadium and the stadium where the Cincinnati Reds play baseball, are visible from the river. While less developed, the Kentucky side is also experiencing growth along the river. Seeing modern Cincinnati it's hard to believe the city was founded in 1788, just a few years after the Revolutionary War.

Time to head back to Montana

Day 8 we left Cincinnati for the four-day trip home. First day we made an interesting stop at the Navy Pier on Lake Michigan in the heart of downtown Chicago. One of the historic landmarks of Chicago, the Navy Pier has served a variety of civilian and military purposes through the years and now, redone in the early 1990's, is a tourist/convention center. The centerpiece is a large hotel set on the pier. There are eateries and entertainment venues including the giant Centennial Wheel (Ferris wheel). We unloaded at the front of the Pier entrance and made our way on to the Pier itself. We passed two hours having lunch and exploring the Pier, then eased out of Chicago during rush hour.

The next two days, back across Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota, we visited the Minnesota History Center, in the Twin Cities, and the North Dakota Heritage Center on the grounds of the state capitol in Bismark. In the Twin Cities I especially enjoyed an exhibit about Minnesota native son Charles Schulz who created the cartoon strip "Peanuts."

Another interesting experience was a meal at the Big Marina Buffet in a suburb of the Twin Cities. It was a buffet type eatery specializing in Mideastern dishes and popular with local immigrants of the Muslim faith. We ate seated "cheek to jowl" and piled our dishes, like the natives, high. Unlike the natives, we had no clear idea what we were eating. I did recognize macaroni and cheese, but that was about it. Not even Babe Ruth hit a home run every time at bat and this meal was a strike out as far as eateries went.

We spent one more night on the road in Watford City. Our last day on the road we made a rest stop at a revitalized rest stop in Culbertson, Montana (rest stops are few and far between out in that area).

Two hours after our final lunch stop in Glasgow the first drop off of passengers occurred at the Chinook Senior Center. Center Director Ginger Hansen had laid out a welcoming assortment of homemade goodies, fresh fruit and refreshing drinks. The folks disembarking in Chester enjoyed their break, loaded up and we said our good-byes. For us Chinook folks the trip was over.

The trip was awe inspiring. Going east we saw interesting parts of the Midwest, made new friends and learned lots of new things. Someone asked me, "What will you do now that you are home." I replied, "First, take a nap, I've missed eleven days of napping and I need to catch up." Back home I recalled author John Steinbeck's quote about travel: "People don't take trips, trips take people." We had all been 'taken'...and it was great!