We left the Cleveland area early, in the rush hour to Akron and Columbus, and on to Dayton to close the loop on our Wright Brothers pilgrimage.  We arrived at the Air Force Museum just before 1100, and spent the next six hours wandering through 108 years of military aviation history, ending with a drive downtown to stand in front of the Wright Cycle Company, where it all began with two bicycle mechanics obsessed with a quest for flight.

After such a long day, we were glad to have reserved a room nearby. We enjoyed an evening out with vegetarian “bar food” appetizers at a nearby pub.  The next morning, we headed west in an all-day rainstorm, plowing a tunnel through the mist through Indiana and Illinois to cross the Mississippi and arrive in Iowa for the night, fighting a fierce northeasterly wind to get to our room, which no doubt had helped the gas mileage on our long day’s drive.

Sunday morning, it was still raining, but less.   We headed west to Iowa City for morning coffee, a convoluted search because of massive downtown road construction and closures, but worth it to find a huge coffee shop in this University town.  By the time we reached Waterloo, the iPhone we’ve been using for navigation got indecisive about routing, so we ended up driving west on US 20 to I-35 and north to I-90, a bit farther, but easy to follow.

We thought about a hot sit-down lunch, but the restaurants at Clear Lake-Mason City and in Albert Lea, Minnesota were backed up with locals as well as tourists on a spring Sunday mid-day, so we grabbed our usual yogurt and hummus in the convenience store section of a travel stop and moved on, later stopping at a supermarket for eat-in-the-room cold supper supplies.  Traveling in the south and midwest is difficult for a vegetarian: we find ourselves improvising a lot, eating cold out of grocery stores and coffee shops, with the occasional veggie burger patty and all-day breakfast eggs ala carte (no bacon in my milkshake, please).  Judy is still in the “road kill vegetarian” mode, not one to turn down a meal just because it was prepared with chicken broth or spiced with bacon bits, and she does order seafood within sight of salt water.

The sun came out as we arrived in my birthplace, Jackson, MN, where we had a lunch appointment the next day with the family elder, my one remaining aunt.  We spent the morning in the local coffee shop, one of the few espresso places in this part of the world (we found two more in Algona, Iowa, the next day).  Our lunch turned into a whole afternoon of reminiscing, mostly among the three nurses.  Aunt Jo was an Army nurse in WWII at various military hospitals and POW camps around the country, and had a long career in Jackson hospitals. Cousin Cathy recently retired from 39 years of nursing, and Judy was active in nursing for 35 years before opening her fiber arts and quilting business in 2001.

After our visit, we traveled a short way “down the road” into northern Iowa, staying overnight at Emmetsburg, a town about which I had heard a lot, growing up, but had never visited.  A caffeine recharge in the aforementioned coffee shop in Algona sustained us into Mason City, better known as “River City” in “The Music Man,” as it was the home of composer and playwright Meredith Wilson.  Mason City is also the site of the only remaining hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The hotel and attached bank building were the basis for the design of the famous Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan, which has since been destroyed.  The town is also home to many street sculptures, most around the Central Park and the city library.

Our destination in Iowa was our daughter’s house.  She had recently moved to “Brick City,” Clermont, home town of Iowa’s first governor, William Larrabee . Clermont is a picturesque collection of historic brick buildings straddling the Turkey River in a pretty valley at the edge of the rugged Driftless region of bluffs and canyons radiating outward from the Mississippi River between Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, a region in stark contrast to the deep layer of glacial drift in the surrounding area.  This spring brought a half-dozen kids to the small goat herd on their 7-acre hobby farm at the edge of town, so we spent some time in the barn with the nippy little critters and the rest of the herd.  She is a jewelry artist: we got to see her latest creations before they went off to a gallery for a weekend show.  A good visit, all too short to take in the area, but we’ll be back.

The final stage in our expedition took us the short way down through the bluffs to cross the Mississippi for breakfast and coffee in Prairie du Chien  and on to our son’s home near Madison, Wisconsin, looking forward to seeing the grandchildren this weekend before our flight home on Monday.  As it turned out, it was a typical weekend for our family: our son was on call for his job on the organ transplant team, was called out to travel to Illinois soon after we arrived and again (to California) during lunch the next day, so we were left to pick up our grandson after school for the weekend.  Reminded me of the bad old days in the 1970s and 1980s when I would rush off to the airport after dinner or in the middle of the day to parts unknown and return days or weeks later, having worked long days or around the clock on ships or secure shore facilities with no outside communications.

But, we had a nice visit through Mothers Day, and had most of Monday to prepare for our evening flight home, having put 5600 km on the rental car since stopping our bicycle adventure in South Carolina after 600 km.  So it goes.  We are headed home, looking forward to a summer of shorter bicycle adventures and road trips.