Dyersville, Iowa City, West Branch, and Amana, IA: September 2-3, 2024 - We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover

This was a true roadtrip day; a day of many small stops in random places between two major points of interest.  Iowa City was probably the biggest city on the docket, and we barely even stopped there!

Up and on our way nice and early, now with fully reset internal clocks, our first stop was a little place in Dyersville that many a sports fan will likely recognize right away:

Here was the real, actual location where Field of Dreams was filmed, all the way back in 1989.  And while I'm sorry to say I have never seen the film, I could appreciate how cool it was that they not only allow you to go onto the baseball field itself, but they provide balls and bats for you to hit a few while you're there too!

And I am told that there are real live ghosts that work there, emanating from the corn and delighting guests!  But I think that day was their day off.

The house tour would have cost money, and we would have had to wait awhile for the first one to start, so we skipped it, and as such, did not stay too terribly long.  But that's ok!  We saw what there was to see.

Next, in the aforementioned Iowa City, we rode by the old state capitol, as well as ate lunch at a place called 30hop.

And that was it!  So much for the city named after the state!

Backtracking a bit, we then made our way to West Branch, where the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum sits, as that was ol' Herb's childhood home.

It's his 150th birthday this year!

I have to say, Hoover is probably among the most unfairly maligned presidents in our history.  The Great Depression truly was not his fault, and his unsuccessful attempts to mitigate or end it can be fully excused by his lack of a time machine, as the Keynesian economic ideas that might have served him well were developed after the 1929 crash.  But after our tour of his museum - he's the earliest president to have a Presidential Library and Museum by the way! - I can happily report that I've learned he became quite the beloved "elder statesman" in his post-presidency years.

Well done, Herb.

The next destination was truly a roll of the dice; it was a place called the Devonian Fossil Gorge, which conjures to mind images of vast, dusty deserts filled with dino bones and tramp archaeologists combing through millions of years of history beneath their feet.

It was not quite that, although there were very old fossils to be seen:

The Devonian period was, to be fair, about 400 million years ago, so to see the traces of life from that time is pretty staggering.  Even if they are just lil shell guys.

That's the Devonian Period, within the Paleozoic Era, which is of course part of the Phanerozoic Eon.  I know we all know our taxonomy of geologic time.

The place itself was not too extensive, so before too long we'd walked the entire length and back of the dry former ocean bed, and hopped in the car to continue on.

Our final stop and place to stay that night was Amana Colonies, a rustic little village stuck out of time that is authentic but...like, they go out of their way to keep it that way.  Like, it isn't Frontierland.  They really do live & work there in the "old ways".  But it's also good for tourism so.  They're gonna stay like that.

The shops were all very quaint and charming, though, with one having a year-round Christmas branch to it, where you can buy anything you could conceive of that is Christmas-related:

And fine artisan cheeses!  Makes me think back to Wisconsin.

The one shame of it was, though, that arriving in the late afternoon meant we barely saw any of the "working" town.  There are like, blacksmiths and tailors and cobblers and such that you can go see work during business hours but - as we found out - that all shuts down about 4:00pm or so.  

I got the sense that this could have been our Mackinac Island for this trip, or our Teddy Roosevelt NP, that undiscovered little gem that ends up being the top highlight of the whole thing.  It was certainly idyllic and peaceful; you definitely felt transported to somewhere other than rural Iowa.  Maybe if we'd had a full day of seeing those artisans and craftspeople at work, it would have been.  And it's really our fault, for scheduling it this way.  Not that we had a bad time, mind you.

I did get to have beer in a Das Boot though!

Not a bad consolation prize.

With nothing going on in the town, we turned in early, and got up the next morning for a nice breakfast at the local bakery right as it opened:

and then we were on our way!

Dubuque and Maquoketa, IA: August 31-September 1, 2024 - Caves, Clocks, and Cable Cars

We were still pretty tired from the night before, so a coffee stop was deemed necessary on our journey north out of Davenport on Saturday:

The place was called The Vault because it was in an old bank that still had the vault!

We were on our way to Dubuque for a two night stop, but on the way in we took a gander at Maquoketa Caves State Park, an interesting area with landscapes I personally wouldn't have expected to see in Iowa:

The caves were kind of scattered throughout a normal forested trail area, rather than one big entrance into a cave system.  So you could just meander in and out on your journey through!

And then at last we completed the journey to Dubuque, checking into the hotel and heading into town for beer n' grub at a brewery called Backpocket to cap off our first full day:

Sleep was wonderfully welcome that night, with all of us turning in early to reset ourselves and prep for the week ahead.

The next morning, we headed to the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium, a neat twist on your standard aquarium, as it pertained specifically to Mississippi River ecology and geology.

They had a couple neat exhibits, like this water table that demonstrated the Mississippi flooding its banks, and a video wall that shows a flyover (time lapse) of the entire length of the river:

Outside, there was a continuation of the aquarium into the museum - because technically, this was the Museum and Aquarium - i.e., two different things, joined together by an outdoor promenade.  

This included a side visit to A Boat:

And then the Museum proper:

Next on the agenda was heading into town for lunch, which ended up being at a place called 1st and Main

The next stop is kind of an odd one.  There is this cable car in the middle of town:

And you can ride up for like two bucks, taking you to a lovely overlook of the town:

Now.  Why is there a cable car in Dubuque?  Well.

The place is called Fenelon Place Elevator Company.  In my mind, this must have been an old elevator manufacturer that, as a gimmick, created a cable car up to the factory to drum up business.  It would be the talk of the town, and everyone would want to buy their elevators from Fenelon Place.  Sort of an early 20th Century version of "going viral".

But it turns out it's almost the exact opposite.  The cable car is the company in its entirety - it was built by a banker in the 1800s who got fed up with, essentially, his commute down into town from his home up on the hill, and put these cable cars in to get up & down quicker.  Some time later, the cable cars were rolled into a business to make some money off of 'em, and Fenelon was born.

So it was a very amusing way to get up into the hilly part of town and see the view.  Upon returning down to the land of mere mortals, we took a stroll over to another Dubuque landmark, their town clock:

And then, a return to the river to see the art along the riverwalk and take a short break off our feet:

There were a couple other places marked on our list, but we were once again getting tired - that first night did not set us up for success, I'd reckon - so while we did stop in at the Dubuque Arboretum, it was mainly to take an ice cream break, followed by just a quick look around:

And that was just fine.  The pace of this trip ended up being a little slower than the previous two, and that was okay.  It's likely obvious, but the point of these trips was never seeing every sight these states had to offer.  It was to just do something together.

Dinner followed at another brewery, this one called 7 Hills, with dishes that looked mighty similar to the ones the night before:

And ya know, that's okay too.