Memorial Day saw us off early after another wonderful breakfast at our AirB&B hosts.  Of course, it was raining to load the car, gas up, and ignore the GPS on the county roads until we got northeast to Hwy 63 and U.S. 18.

One of our daughters has a friend in Clermont, the “Brick City,” so we took a few pictures cruising down Main Street and stopped at Montauk, the mansion of a former Iowa governor, overlooking the town from the east.  A really pretty area.

On through Postville, a true all-American city, where we saw two Hasidic men walking to synagogue on one side of town and what we thought might be two Somali Muslim women crossing the highway on the other side of town, headed toward the cemetery.  The cemetery was decked out with large American flags spaced throughout, very impressive.

Over the Mississippi for a light lunch at Prairie du Chien, where we asked for the “Twitter version” of the geology behind the region’s “Driftless” designation.  Turns out this section of Iowa and Wisconsin was untouched by the glaciers of the last Ice Age, so retain the rugged cliffs on either side of the Mississippi, a contrast to the rolling black dirt farmland left behind as the glaciers retreated, along with the crop of boulders and round rocks that appeared on the surface, pushed up by the spring thaw for many decades after the land was first plowed, and may still in some areas in extreme cold years.  Clearance cairns of fieldstone with boulders up to a meter across can still be seen in the corners of farm fields.

Mid-afternoon, we arrived at our son’s house near Madison, where we will spend the next week visiting and, hopefully, bicycling, though the rainy spring weather continues.  We finished the day with dinner at P.F. Chang’s, once again in a metropolitan area with overwhelming choices of eateries and shops.

All photos by Judy