Day One — The Avenue of 444 Flags at the Hillcrest Memorial Gardens, Hermitage, Pennsylvania, sprang from the hostage crisis in Iran, one flag for each day the Americans there were detained. Every Flag Day brings an outpouring of media.

Day Six — At Wickliffe, Kentucky, that’s the Fort Jefferson Cross at the Confluence, still a work in progress according to Anita Howie, a driving force behind its continuous construction. She called us back three times with updates. It stands 90 feet high on a 20-foot pedestal, particularly visible to pilgrims eastbound from Missouri.

Day Eight — Both football and baseball are played in the coliseum at Okemah, although it is referred to only as the town highway garage. Its date of construction eluded us, but a clerk in the town hall says it held prisoners during World War II

Day Eight — Carl Hubbell was actually born in Carthage, MO, we are reminded by author Mark Harris, but he made the move to Meeker at the age of one. Hubbell appears in Harris’ fictional “Ticket for a Seamstitch,” also about a transcontinental odyssey.

Days Eleven, Twelve — As suburbanites of Buffalo, NY, we can sympathize with a city painted in unflattering strokes by transient reporters. It happens to us all the time. Therefore, we regret that our El Paso experience was so grim, and that we must report it so. We are sure that El Paso has much to recommend it, else why would a quarter-million people choose to live there? Within the self-imposed constraints of our routing, this was what we found, and we beg the indulgence of rightfully offended El Pasans.