With our family heirloom duties out of the way, the bike finally “tour-ready,” and our feathers ruffled by our first encounter with camper class discrimination, we moved on to survey the High Trestle Trail, our next bucket list item. We checked out the trailheads in Woodward and Madrid, deciding to start our ride the next day in Madrid. Our choice for RV parks didn’t pan out: near the big city (Des Moines, the capital) and Saylorville Lake, all sites were booked for the weekend. So, we cashed in some of our discount points and stayed in a motel in the city for the weekend.

On Friday, we set out from Madrid, where the Flat Tire Lounge served up dark beers and microwaved frozen cheese pizza after our ride.  We crossed the spectacular High Trestle to Woodward, then retraced the path back to Madrid and finished with a round trip across the prairie to Slater, for 41 km total. On Saturday, we started at the southern terminus of the trail in Ankeny and rode the hillier half north to Slater, where a Boy Scout Jamboree was in progress, explaining the dozens of teens on bikes we saw on the trail. Being Saturday, and soon after RAGBRAI, (the 44-year-old annual ride across Iowa that is a rite of passage for riders from all over the country), the trail was crowded with many other cyclists as well. Despite the light rain starting out, we had a good ride, another 40 km.

Sunday, we took a spin around the Iowa state capitol, then headed southeast to the corner of the state, Keokuk, at the confluence of the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers. On the way, we stopped in Eldon at the house that inspired the famous Grant Wood painting, “American Gothic.” Thunderstorms swept in, so we opted for yet another motel night, upriver in Fort Madison.

Moving up the Mississippi, we crossed over into Illinois to survey the Great River Trail (GRT) through Moline. We stayed at the Illiniwek Campground, which was a delight and right on the trail. Again, we had to plead with the management to treat our nondescript-looking van as an RV and give us a site with electricity so we could run our refrigerator and computers (WiFi, and fast, too!)  The neighbors in our section were mostly travel trailers rather than land yachts, and seemed friendly enough.

Great River Trail from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

We seemed to have picked the best of the GRT, through East Moline and Moline, with great river views, riding through riverfront parks and on the levee for the most part, and we even found a decent, if expensive, coffee shop. We turned around as the trail got confused in road construction near the I-74 bridge, riding back through our campground and under I-80 to Rapids City, where the trail was mainly a widened shoulder on the southbound lane of the highway. We stopped at a family restaurant and found suitable fare, though a bit calorie-heavy.

Duck Creek Parkway from Larye Parkins on Vimeo.

The next day, on recommendation from a cyclist we met on the GRT, we drove across the river to Bettendorf, to the Devils Glen park and rode up the Duck Creek Parkway, a paved bike path winding up the creek through a series of parks, ending at a golf course on the west side of Davenport, the fourth of the Quad Cities, finishing off the week with another 70 km for the two days of riding in the Quad Cities.

After checking out Port Byron on the Illinois side a few miles north, we decided to resume our river tour on the Iowa side, with a grocery stop and coffee shop at Le Claire, then north through Clinton to Bellevue State Park, a quiet campground on top of a hill, away from town and separate from the day-use section of the park. In the morning, we stopped in Dubuque for coffee and fuel before briefly dipping back into Illinois, cutting through East Dubuque into Wisconsin, where we drove quiet roads into Monroe.

We stopped in Monroe, next to a local shoe store on the old town square, picking up some shoes—I had worn out the hiking shoes I bought after my heart surgery for my recovery walks, and Judy needed some sturdy slippers. We walked around the town square and through the old historic courthouse before moving on north toward Madison, stopping once for a snack at New Glarus, a Swiss settlement with a tempting bakery.

We were a day early into Madison, so checked into a motel to do laundry and catch up on computer upgrades. We visited with family in the evening, pausing in our month-long journey and looking forward to the weekend visits.