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Someday — in the far distant future — my mother’s epitaph will read: Just gone to see what’s down the roadÉ

I inherited my wanderlust from my mother. When I was a child (second of eight) growing up in Alliance, Ohio, my mother made a trip to the supermarket an adventure. We took a new road every time. The fact that the supermarket was on our street didn’t deter her from finding an alternate route.

My mother has since crossed the state many times to visit children at college in Cincinnati and relatives in Michigan and various southern states. She even drove across the country with me when I moved to California. She never met a brown historical site marker she didn’t like. She would promise herself, “Someday I’m going to come back and visit (fill in the blank) with every curious site along the way.”

I’ve also inherited her penchant for coming up with crazy plans. A while back I called Mom and said, “You know those places in Ohio you’ve been driving by for years and always said you’d stop and visit someday? Pack a bag. It’s ‘someday.’”

She didn’t hesitate for a second. “I’m ready when you are. Let me make a listÉ” Her list contained 47 points of interest reaching all four corners of the state.

In 12 days we managed to fit in 44 of the 47. We covered birthplaces, boyhood homes, schoolhouses, memorial libraries and tombs of the eight U.S. presidents from Ohio. We drove to Ashtabula in the northeast to look out on Lake Erie and Pennsylvania. In the southeast corner we took an Ohio River cruise on the Valley Gem Sternwheeler in the pouring rain. We drove the Welsh Byway to the Bob Evans Farm for lunch and visited the Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati.

Mark Warther, grandson of famed woodcarver Moony Warther, gave us a personal tour of the model trains his grandfather carved of ebony and ivory at the Warther Museum in Dover. At Roscoe Village, a living history community in Coshocton, Mom dipped candles and I learned my great-grandfather was a cooper as we watched the resident barrel-maker at work. We drove a horse and buggy at Yoder’s Amish Farm, rode a horse-drawn canal boat near Toledo and took a Lantern Tour of the ghosts of Zoar, a 75-year experiment in communal living in the Tuscarawas Valley.

We met some amazing people along the way, but the most interesting person I got to know on the trip was my mother. We spend a couple weeks together every year, but being on the road brought up things I never knew about a woman I’ve known my whole life.

Stories of her childhood emerged among the artifacts in presidential homes and the Heart of Ohio Antique Mall. Over lunch with a couple of locals at the historic Golden Lamb Hotel in Lebanon, my mother told of how her grandmother taught her to read tea leaves when she was a child. With a couple of psychics and astrologers in the family, I’m flummoxed that this is the first time I’ve ever heard that my mother can read tea leaves.

I hold on to this fact until the next opportunity for a cup of tea and challenge her. She nonchalantly glances into my cup, turns it this way and that. “I see travel,” she says. “A trip east.” I laugh. She didn’t need tea leaves to predict that one.

We’ve arranged to end our trip at the family reunion in Dover. Since we spent the night at the Enchanted Pines Bed and Breakfast in New Philadelphia, we’re close by. With a couple of hours to kill, we go back to look at Zoar in the daylight. We drive by the Inn on the River, where we stopped for drinks after our ghost tour the night before. We’ve been past this spot at least a dozen times in my life. As we pause at the intersection, Mom looks down the road to the left. “”I’ve never gone that way on this road,” she says. “Let’s go see what’s down thereÉ”

You can read more from Kayte Deioma at www.RainyDayTraveler.com and http://golosangeles.about.com.