Iowa Trip, Sunday, June 5

We had a great time watching the fireworks with the ‘fam.’ It WAS a very good display, not long but strong, choreographed to patriotic music playing from.........somewhere. We watched from a hilltop on the campus where Wendy goes to school.

Took off this morning Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about 9:00 and drove on I-80 to Omaha, NB. We were leaving the land of corn and windmills and entering the land of milk and honey. Western Iowa is a drive-by state. You’ve seen the extent of what that there is to see after about the first 5 miles. Corn. Don’t get me wrong, I love corn, but I’ve seen much more than I could ever hope to eat, and it’s not ripe yet. It’s kind of like looking at chocolate being prepared, but being told it’s not ready yet leaves an odd taste in your mouth.

When we were in Blue Earth, Minnesota there is a 60” tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant. My question is though, if the Jolly Green Giant lives in Blue Earth, Minnesota, why isn’t he blue, or, even more perplexing, why aren’t the vegetables blue if they come from Blue Earth, Minnesota?

We stopped at a Cabela’s in Omaha while Sandi met a friend of hers at the Cracker Barrel Restaurant nearby. It’s a store where a man can shop for ‘man stuff,’ and if he can manage to take his wife along, to try to convince her that he “needs” that doe attractant for huntin’ season. Or, at least, buy stuff that has a Cabela’s label on it and show other people that he dresses like a ‘man.’ That doe attractant stuff comes in a 6 ounce bottle for $29.99. I don’t even want to know how they collect that stuff. My mind goes wild and none of it’s good. I tried to siddle up to the couple and listen to the plea (for some pointers), but I didn’t want to make myself too obvious so I only heard about the part where he was trying to convince her to let him buy it. It was kind of like this, “it’s made in the USA so it’s patriotic, it’ll keep me outta the bar, it’ll be final proof that I’m a real man’s man. No, honey, I don’t prefer men!” I moved on to the clothing section after that.

It seems that Cabela’s is not just a man’s store. It has women’s clothes too. I happened to walk by the women’s section and noticed that there were racks and racks of women’s swimming suits. One-piece, two piece, and everything in between, although there did seem to be quite an inordinate number of camouflage. Ah-ha!! Another chance to make some points, or at least catch up on some lost opportunities. There happened to be a swimming suit that I thought would look good on Sandi; a one-piece with, you guess it, a camouflage pattern. A very nice, low-key camouflage pattern, a green muted forest pattern if I remember right. Then I remembered something my dad told me, “Don’t buy a woman two things; a purse or a swimming suit, you’ll make the wrong decision every time.”

Have I mentioned museums yet? It seems that there are a lot of museums spread across this good country of ours. I guess that that’s the price to pay for white people living here for the last two-hundred years. They want to pass on to posterity the blight they’ve made on the landscape. Have you ever seen an Indian museum not made by white people trying to assuage there guilt for what they did to the Native Americans? We’ve passed lot of museums and stopped at a few. The National Spam Museum, John Wayne’s Birthplace Museum, Natural Living History Museum, their teaser, ‘Come watch grass grow,’ Czech and Slavic Museum, Propeller Museum, Danish Immigrant Museum and antique store, Mississippi River Museum, to name a few. We did manage to drive by the National Spam Museum without stopping, but I do have to admit, it did make me wonder if they would divulge the ingredients in Spam if we took the tour.

It really makes we wonder what the state of museums will be 100 years from now. Just think, the razor that I’ll purchase tomorrow will one day be under a glass case for others to view as an antiquity. I can see it now, museums and antique stores lining the streets for miles and miles helping people remember the ‘good ‘ole days.’ It has to be something like that. With the increasing number of people and the amount of garbage that we’re producing there must be at least a portion of this that ends up in either a landfill or a museum.

We're at a KOA and the fireflies are out in force.