2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 9

 

This is Part 7 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

I should probably allot more time to car museums in my trip planning, or just not worry about it. Having missed out on seeing the Terrill Museum in DeLeon, Texas; the Heart of 66 museum in Sapulpa, Oklahoma; the Tulsa Museum of Art Deco; Howard's Toys for Big Boys Museum in Chanute, Kansas; the Museum of American Speed in Lincoln; the Schildberg Automobile Museum in Greenfield, Iowa (which may be out of business now); and the Kline Automobile Museum in Prescott, Iowa because of timing, I wasn't about to add the Antique Car Museum of Iowa to that list; so I went to Coralville, which required about 30 miles of backtracking, and checked into a hotel for the night (the same one, incidentally, that I stayed in when I was in Coralville with Rick years ago), and this morning I hung around the town waiting for the museum to open at 10AM. There is very little to do in Coralville, Iowa between 6AM and 10AM. I had breakfast and lots and lots of coffee, and played cards on my computer and read Makers and Takers, a book about the negative effects of the financial industry on American business. I was there when the museum opened; no surprise.

an exception: a 1903 Cadillac Runabout

There's plenty of two-hour on-street free parking in the area of the museum. After two hours I had to go out to move my car. I was in the museum, all together, for three hours. It's fairly large, and has 86 cars on display, arranged more or less chronologically. About half of the space is given over to cars from before the Great Depression, many of which I've never heard of: Holsman; Sears (yes, you ordered it from their catalog); Economy Motor Buggy; Haynes-Apperson; Brush; Demot; Maytag (the washing-machine company tried making cars for a while); Haynes; Whippet; Gardner; Velie; Elmore; National; and Milburn Electric. (The museum provides a list of all the cars on the floor.) And of the cars I have heard of, there were many models I had never seen before. (I hardly took any pictures of the older cars; most of them look alike to me. My interest is mainly in styling, which only began to matter in the mid-to-late 1920s.) Having the cars arranged chronologically made it easy for me to trace developments in early design -- for example, fender fairings, wheel design or standardizations that we take for granted now, like left-hand drive.

Cautionary tale

The museum itself only owns about eight of the cars; the rest belong to people in the area who lend their vehicles for display. While many of the cars are beautifully restored, a number of them are in less than pristine condition, including one Model T that had a tree land on it during a recent storm. It's there, tree limb and all, as a cautionary tale. A number of them seem to be mid-restoration; for example, one vehicle had a front seat that had clearly been restored, while the back seat was just springs. I found the contrast interesting. 

All of the cars were American-made, except for a 1939 Hanomag (German) and a 1964 Volkswagen Beetle (also German). (They were there to make a particular point, but I forget now what that point was.) Because the cars were arranged chronologically (with a few exceptions), and because I could walk all the way around almost every one of them, and because each car had a very informative sign associated with it, I thought this museum is one of the best I've seen at presenting automotive history. Many of the signs go into the history of the manufacturer, which is particularly useful in promoting understanding of the early days of the industry, when it was kind of a Wild West business (like the phone business in the 1980s, or cellphones or internet service in the 2000s). Carmakers merged, or got bought out, or just folded with such regularity and rapidity that it's often hard to know who the players were. 

When I finally tore myself away from the museum, I headed off to Jones and Clinton Counties, and so I have now visited all the counties in Iowa. That makes 36 states that I've finished with; and if I stick to my trip plan, that number will be 39 before I get back home.

The terrain in eastern Iowa is pretty. Many of the roads are boringly straight, but there are enough that curve up and down hills and through river bottoms and woodlands to make me want to hug myself with the joy of driving. The same is true of Illinois -- and, frankly, of almost every state east of the Dry Line. (The only exception I'm aware of is northern Indiana, which is in its own category of boring.)

Mississippi River at Sabula, Iowa

For the drive from Coralville to the Mississippi River, I'd taken the precaution of emailing the route to myself last night. I'm not sure if that made a difference; I think it still needs an internet connection, but as far as I can tell I had 4G service the whole time today. And I avoided technology issues with my audiobook software by not turning it on. I drove in silence all day, and found it relaxing in a kind of 20th-Century way. I may never turn the radio on again; at least, not while I'm using GPS.

The Black Hawk Statue overlooking the Rock River

I stopped in Oregon, Illinois to book a hotel down the road and to visit the so-called Black Hawk statue in one of the state parks in the area. The statue isn't actually intended as a representation of Black Hawk -- a chief of the Sauk and Fox tribe who refused to leave after other chiefs gave up tribal lands in the early 1800s. The 1832 war to evict him and his followers -- the Black Hawk War -- saw a young captain of volunteers named Abraham Lincoln posted to Dixon, a town 20 miles or so south on the Rock River. In the early 1900s, a monumental statue of a generic Indian was built at Oregon, while some time after that a lifesized bronze statue of a young Abe Lincoln was erected at Dixon.

Lincoln

Both sides' heroes are represented, one realistically, one romantically.

I had intended to stop at another state park near Oregon, a place called Castle Rock. I drove right past it. I had forgotten to check my plan on RoadTrippers, and was distracted by the beauty of the Rock River on the left-hand side and by a tailgater in my rearview mirror (until I flashed my rear fog lights; he backed off then). I thought about going back to it -- it's only about 15 miles. But I only had it as a stopping place because it's supposed to give a grand view of the river, and I feel like I got that just from the road. So, no; not going back. Instead I will go on to Starved Rock, which is ahead of me. I'm also going to skip the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, the John Deere Historical Site, and the John Deere Home, because, frankly, I'm not sufficiently interested in those places to actually go to them. 

I checked into my motel (on Bloody Gulch Road, of all places) and found a place for dinner called The Corner Spot Bar & Grill. Ever since I started travelling in the upper midwest, I've found that places called "Bar & Grill" have a certain old-world atmosphere about them. Before I started going to them, I thought they were, you know, just bars. But up here in the North, they're more like quaint, unpretentious taverns where you can get a beer or a whiskey with your meal. So I purposefully looked on line for "Bar & Grill". The only one listed locally is an expensive restaurant at a country club. So I just looked for "Bars" and found several listings, all of which had food. I picked one that seemed a likely candidate for the kind of ambience I was looking for -- the kind of place that would be at home on McKay Avenue in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, or along the highway in Trempeleau. 

The Corner Spot was not that kind of place. It was a generic sports bar. But it had friendly staff and reasonable prices (and all orders come with unlimited salad bar -- my first vegetables in a while, I think), and they put a soccer game on for me. Sadly, it was perhaps the dullest MLS match of the past 25 years, between Philadelphia Union and Atlanta. Every time I looked up at the screen, play was stopped for a foul or an injury; and every time I looked away, somebody scored. And the pace of play seemed slow. It did not make me think, Gee, I should watch more MLS. 

I ate too much for the first time on this trip.

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2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 8

This is Part 6 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

I wonder why there aren't more motel rooms in places like Percival, Iowa. There are, it appears, only two motels in this town, which seems to consist of those two motels and two truck stops and a few fast-food restaurants. Both of the motels in Percival are fully booked, even though the room rates are pretty high. (The rates in Nebraska City, a few miles away, are positively exorbitant, even though there are lots of motels over there. That's why I'm in Percival and not Nebraska City ... well, that, and because there's a water tower in Percival that looks like a teapot, and I found yesterday evening that it's real pretty at night, all lit up with red neon.) (My sunrise pictures of the water tower from this morning are much better than the pictures from last night; although you still can't really tell that it looks like a big teapot. The red rings on top light up in succession, and it says "Sapp Bros" on the sides in huge letters. My pics are all taken from the handle side.)

Today was mostly supposed to be all about county-counting, but a good bit of it was about the failure of technology. I've already ranted about it over the phone to Sherry, so here I will just say that technology that depends on an internet connection is of very limited use in places like southern Iowa. And that includes Google Maps and Libby, the app I'm using to listen to audiobooks (or trying to, anyway). I got 8 of the 10 remaining Iowa counties today; I would have missed one because of the failure of Google Maps, but I thought to check where, exactly, the county was in relation to the highway. I really would have been pissed if I'd gotten to my hotel for the night and then discovered the omission.*

There were four counties in southwestern Iowa that I hadn't been to. The only point of interest in any of them was Johnny Carson's birthplace, in Corning (Adams County). It was $10 to go in, which is way too much for such a trivial place. Besides, he grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, and that's the place he considered his home; this is just where his parents lived when he made his first entrance.

While I was stopped for a break at a convenience store I got into a conversation with a local woman who used to be the city clerk for Gravity, Iowa, in Taylor County, the last of those four. She told me about the town sign; said she saw it every day for years and never got the joke until one day it suddenly dawned on her, and ever since then she can't think of it without laughing. So I made it a point to go that way and see the sign myself.

It is kind of cute.

After that, it was a looooong slog across the state on Highway 2, from west to east, until I got to the remaining batch of counties, more or less along the Mississippi River. The only point of interest I found there was the Louisa County Swinging Bridge. It crosses a gorge in a park in the town of Columbus Junction. You can access one end of it just above the parking area, or you can access the other end by taking a trail that goes down into the gorge and then up the other side to the bridge. I chose to take the trail.

Two things about the trail: first, it's very narrow, about 18" wide on average, and fairly steep. Steps have been put in at a number of spots to help, and the drop-off is generally not great, but I would not want to be on that path after a rain. I'm sure it's very slick. The second thing is this: the path is lined with signboards containing pages from a children's book about an alligator. The book didn't make any sense to me; it seemed to tell the story of how the friendly alligator went from owning a restaurant for his friends the birds, to eating the birds. A really unpleasant story, not something I'd've wanted to read to my son when he was a child. But in the end I realized that the story is arranged to be read starting from the other end of the path: the lazy alligator opens a restaurant to trick the birds into eating in his mouth, but then he becomes friends with the birds. That's a much better children's book.

Louisa County Swinging Bridge

The bridge itself was pretty terrifying, but I made it across. It swings back and forth and it tips sideways like Galloping Gertie in the 1940 film of that bridge's collapse.

That's pretty much the whole day. Fortunately the scenery in Iowa, even in the ordinary places, is verdant and attractive, and the temperature today topped out at 86 degrees; and I don't think I saw a single cloud all day.

I'm in Coralville, Iowa tonight; there's a car museum here that opens at 10AM that I plan to stick around for; then I'll drive through the last two Iowa counties on the way to Illinois and Indiana, and on Thursday I should get to Michigan. I don't know how long it'll take me to do all the wandering I plan to do there. As you might imagine, I'm somewhat averse to that level of prediction.  

* I also have complaints about my phone's bluetooth, my phone charger, and my car's new stereo. Don't ask.

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