What a contrast. Friday I ran myself ragged covering territory from Hanover to Rapids City, Illinois, roughly 60 miles. Between 8am and 7pm, I visited 19 park and recreation areas, toured 8 museums/attractions, and ate lunch at a biker themepark restaurant called Poopy’s whose menu makes liberal use of the word shit. In my haste to cram all these sites into my day, I had to ditch plans for hiking and bluff climbing. I’m sure that’s a relief to some of you. After an exhausting day of running around, I had trouble finding my hotel in Moline and spent nearly 45 minutes driving around lost. Thank goodness I had good Thai food for dinner and the comfort of hanging out with friends at the Blue Cat Brewpub in Rock Island.
De Immigrante windmill
Saturday could not be more different. My agenda is just as ambitious as Friday but includes many more museums and only a handful of parks. I start the day back in Fulton, Illinois, a town with a Dutch heritage and windmill to proudly advertise it, hoping that the Saturday morning hours posted for the Martin House Museum in the visitor’s center are correct. They aren’t but I get lucky – a couple of volunteers were present to set up a new fall exhibit of antique license plates and duck decoys. They are nice enough to let me in the house and give me a tour. That was stroke of luck number one.
Finished in Fulton, I cross the Mississippi into Clinton, Iowa to snap a few bridge pictures, I have a thing for bridges, and to start exploring the town. I am expecting to tour the historical museum in the afternoon when it will be open from 1-4, like everything else I am trying to see in Clinton. When I drive past it in the morning, however, it is already open. Great, I think. I can go through it now and have more time in the afternoon for the other sites in town. This is stroke of luck number two, even though it takes me over an hour to get through the museum. Who knew they have four rooms on two floors packed to the rafters with stuff?
I take my bridge pics after the museum, then eat at a hole-in-the-wall BBQ joint. Let me be as direct as I can: if you are in the Clinton area and you see yourself surrounded by familiar fast food chains, eating at one of them instead of Papa Petes’ isn’t just dumb, it’s a mortal sin. You can punch your ticket to Hell, which I am convinced will be populated with the very same fast food places and their cousins, the big box retailers. Honestly, I don’t understand why anyone would choose to eat at one of those generic food wastelands when they could have a meal made from scratch for the same money and in the same amount of time. For me, this was stroke of luck number three. I was on a roll.
Now that it is pushing 1pm, I need to cover some ground, 45 miles of asphalt, to be precise, to get to the little town of St. Donatus for Sorghum Fest. This may not excite many of you, but it excites me. I have never been to a festival dedicated to all things sorghum before, nor do I know anyone who has. Do you? I thought this festival was last weekend and was bummed that I missed it. Lucky stroke number four: I had the date wrong and now I get to go sorghum-festing. I’ll have more to say in a future blog, but suffice it to say that I don’t think I will need to go every year but it was fun, and not just because some of them remembered me from Luxembourg Day in June.
I have more territory to cover and the day is rapidly getting away from me. I am beginning to accept the fact that I will not be getting through everything on my agenda, which means I will have to make another trip up here. I really wanted to be done with this section of the river after this weekend, but there are just too many time-consuming sites to visit. So I backtrack to the town of Bellevue where I have not yet had a chance to tour the Young Museum. When I arrive, I am the only guest, and, judging from the names in the guestbook, I am the only visitor of the day. Lucky stroke number five: Lucille is my tour guide. Lucille is 84 years old and has lived most of her life in Bellevue. Never especially well off, she raised a son on her own and worked at the same job for 35 years before retiring. The Young Museum is quite different from others in the small towns that I have visited. It is not really a history museum, but rather a storehouse for the varied and extensive collection of antiques, china, figurines, tea pots, and well, just about any damn thing that Mrs. Young could get her hands on. Lucille has been a volunteer here for well over a decade and is the local expert on the collection. She is also the polar opposite of the stuffy, prudish small town woman of stereotypes. Please visit this place while you can, to say hi to Lucille and to show the short-sighted city leaders that this is a valued part of the community’s heritage and that they should shut up about closing it and selling off the collection.
View of Bellevue from the state park
After my tour with Lucille, I figure my day couldn’t be more memorable. That’s when I have stroke of luck number six. Just north of Clinton, Iowa is the Wide River Winery. I expect them to close around 5pm, and it is 4:45 as I pull into the parking lot. I figure I have just enough time to sample another middling Midwestern wine or two before getting kicked out. As I get out of the car, I am surprised to see so many political signs planted in the yard. It is bold for a small business to take such an openly political position, I think to myself. As I approach the tasting room, I figure out what is going on – I have stumbled into a fundraising event for Hillary’s campaign. (Stop groaning, mom.) Unfortunately, America’s Iron Lady is not going to be making an appearance, but I do get some time to chat politics with a few Iowa voters. Maybe one of these weekends I will stumble across an event with a real live candidate. Heck, I’d even go to see Mitt Romney, if he and I were in the same town at the same time. I might heckle, but I’d still go.
Bad Decision of the Day: Not writing down the name of my hotel and not checking on the directions to find it. OK, so it’s not as dramatic as nearly falling off a bluff, but not every bad decision has to be life threatening. I had just joined the rewards program for Choice Hotels. They have several brands, and a couple of them have similar names and logos. When I made the reservation on-line, I wrote down the address but forgot to write down the name of the hotel. I assumed, based on my extensive knowledge of the Quad Cities, that the hotel was near the airport. After 45 very frustrating minutes of driving around blinded by my extensive knowledge of the Quad Cities, I finally found the hotel tucked away on a back street behind a mall, not too far from the airport as the crow flies, but crows don’t have to detour around interstates and other limited access roads.
© Dean Klinkenberg, 2007
