Sarah Palin is headed 'back to Alaska for the start of the school year.' Palin tour comes to abrupt halt

After just four days on the road, Sarah Palin’s bus tour is going dormant again.

In a note posted on her Facebook page Monday, Palin said she’s headed “back to Alaska for the start of the school year.”


What’s next for the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee? “While kids crack open their school books, I look forward to continuing my own writing and research on strategies and plans to help move our country forward,” she wrote.

Palin noted that she’ll be back on the road before long — she’s scheduled to keynote a Sept. 3 tea party rally in Waukee, Iowa, near Des Moines.

Her Facebook note didn’t mention it, but she’s also scheduled to headline an Oct. 7 rally with Glenn Beck in St. Charles, Mo., according to a local conservative talk-radio station’s announcement Monday.

The leg of Palin’s “One Nation” bus tour that’s now ending lasted four days, beginning midday Friday, when Palin appeared at the Iowa State Fair — just in time for her to catch the attention of the assembled national political media mob in town for the Ames Straw Poll.

On Saturday, she visited Ronald Reagan’s childhood home in Dixon, Ill., and his nearby alma mater of Eureka College. She was in Eureka when the straw poll results were released, and NBC News asked her what she thought of the results.

“The prediction was that it would either be Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann because they spent a lot of time and energy to make sure they had delegates there who would cast those votes — so not really a surprise,” Palin told NBC, the only major news outlet following her in Illinois.

That single camera marked a dramatic change from the media horde that pursued Palin during her May swing through the Northeast. That first leg of the tour, which began in Washington, D.C., and wound up in New Hampshire, lasted six days.

On Sunday, Palin was touring the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., when the news broke that Tim Pawlenty was dropping out of the race.

“I would love to have seen Pawlenty stay in there and allow the voters to decide, not internal political machinery decide who should be in the race and who should not,” she told NBC’s Alex Moe.

On Monday, Palin said she spent the day in Kansas City, Mo. She posted on her Facebook page a photo of her daughter Piper and niece McKinley, with the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial in the background.

“Reading the many memorial inscriptions while standing in the rain was a somber and humbling reminder of the sacrifices young Americans made nearly a century ago in distant battlefields so far from home,” Palin wrote in her Facebook note.

The memorial, she said, reminded her why she was doing the bus tour: “This is why I wanted to bring my own children with me, to show them our history and remind them that America’s children will carry the torch of freedom one day.”

Palin didn’t say whether she plans to continue the tour.