That first night was a rough one. About one in the morning, the person in the room next to mine put on a CD of some woman covering Hank Williams songs. And while I like Hank Williams, a female voice warbling about having the Ho-on-onky Tonk Blue-ue-ues has a sort of icepick to the ear feeling to it. I banged on the connecting door and on the front door of their room, but was stuck waiting for about 45 minutes for the damned midnight serenade to run its course.
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| Sculpture Garden |
I woke up fairly early in spite of the interruption to my sleep, and got ready and checked out. Grabbed a breakfast at a café up the road a bit, and then headed down to St. Feriole Island, where I walked through the sculpture park, along the Mississippi, and looked at the signs and historic buildings. Thanks to a big flood in 1965 that put the island under five feet of water, and a decade of floods following it, the federal government finally paid some aid to help people move off the island, and it was turned into a park.
Having finished with the park, I headed across the river to Iowa. Third state of the trip! I headed up to Effigy Mounds National Monument, figuring that a bit of walking around would be nice, but when I started walking the route, I discovered that hills were too much for me. I could have stuck it out and walked up and down, but the idea of doing that to see some piles of dirt didn’t seem like the best plan a guy could have, so I headed back to the car and moved on down the road.
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| View near Guttenberg, IA |
Just south of Guttenberg, Iowa, there was a little “Scenic View” pull-off from the highway. And sure enough, it was plenty scenic.
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| Breitbach’s, Balltown, IA |
I continued on down the road to Balltown. It’s the home of Breitbach’s, which is the oldest bar in Iowa. I’m not hungry for lunch yet, and the place is packed, so I don’t even head inside, but just shoot a photo from outside. But also here in Balltown is the second highest point in Iowa, from which I shoot a panorama, and a shot of the memorial bench telling of the guy who donated the land for the view.
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| Field of Dreams |
A little backtracking, and winding through nearly unmarked country roads (or roads marked with street signs, but no highway marker to match my map), and I finally see a sign that says “Thank you for visiting the Field of Dreams.” As I haven’t yet been there, I hang a U-turn, and sure enough, the other side of the sign directs me down a road I’d just passed. Apparently nobody comes the way I did. Anyway, I make the turn, and am tooling down a country road when I see two signs and driveways for the field. What? A quick decision takes me in the second driveway, since it looks a little nicer and is closer to home plate. Turns out there had been a controversy since left and center field were owned by different folks than the family with the house and the infield, but just before I got there, the Lansing family had purchased the rest of the field, and now it’s all under a single owner (and presumably the second souvenir stand will be torn down). I guess they just haven’t had time to take down the signs warning about the “out of state private investors” yet. Anyway, I stopped at the Field of Dreams store and bought a baseball cap. And just as I was leaving, three minivans full of high-school girls in uniforms showed up. I thought about staying to watch some ball, but I’d had enough.
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| National Farm Toy Museum |
Next stop was the National Farm Toy Museum in Dyersville. This was one of the coolest stops of the trip, and I enjoyed looking at all the toy tractors and speculating with another visitor what our toys would have been worth if we’d saved ’em all. I spent over a half-hour walking through the exhibits, which for this trip was a pretty long stop. Lots of the things I stopped at were of the “Yep. I saw it. Done now.” type, but this required closer investigation. I probably would have stayed even longer, except I started getting hungry, so I decided to move on.
I drove into Dubuque, since I hadn’t seen any non-chain restaurant, and wasn’t likely to while driving on US 20. Got all the way into town, and pulled into the River Museum. Grabbed lunch in the café, and walked through the museum. I was pretty underwhelmed by it, but then I headed out into the courtyard, where they were having some sort of heritage days thing, with demonstrations. There was a guy hand-rifling a rifle barrel (for a .45 caliber black-powder muzzleloader), and I stopped and talked to him for quite a while. As I was leaving, a reporter from the local paper interviewed me about it. I can’t find any article that resulted, but they seem to hide their content behind a pay-wall, so it’s hard to be sure if I made the paper or not.
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| Dickeyville Grotto |
After the museum, it was time to cross back into Wisconsin to visit the Dickeyville Grotto. This was another of those sites that I looked at, said Huh!
and moved on. Yes, it’s interesting to see the things that people will do as a hobby (or obsession), but it didn’t really move me.
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| Mississippi from Sabula, IA |
The next stop was Sabula City, Iowa. Nothing really notable about it, except that it was a good place to get off the road for a few minutes, and there was a nice view of the Mississippi from the municipal park on the waterfront. The other reason for the stop was that I’d discovered that there seem to be a fair number of people in Iowa who are “too polite to pass” and who will tool along, right on your rear bumper for miles, even if you slow way down in the passing zone to let them by. The only way to shake ’em seemed to be pulling off the road entirely, and this was one such stop.
Then it was on to the Quad Cities. I stopped in Le Claire, Iowa, which is a northern suburb. There was a Holiday Inn Express right on the road, just before getting to I-80. I didn’t much feel like venturing beyond that, so I checked in, and then headed across the road to a Subway. I was breaking my rule of no chain restaurants on the second day, but it seemed for the best, since there’d been construction on the road that I’d just come through, no small restaurants in sight, and I was just tired and hungry.
The nicest thing about the hotel was that there were balconies on the river side, so I sat on my balcony and collected my notes for the day, watching the river and the marina next to the hotel, where a big fork lift was putting boats onto big shelves as people called it a day. And I knew that the sound-proofing would be better than the previous night, so it was likely I’d be able to sleep through the night. That sounded pretty good to me.