Day 7: Fairfield to Cedar Rapids

I woke up today to thunderstorms over the prairie. I really like the rain, so that was nice, especially as I was half-awake. Unfortunately it kept raining throughout most of the day, which put a little bit of a damper on picture taking. Only a couple today.

We started off with a quick tour of Maharishi University and then downtown Fairfield. We stopped in at a high-end kitchen store owned by a friend of Susan's. It was exactly the kind of store that would fit right in to West Hartford Center. Somehow, despite the fact that we're passing through these tiny little rural Iowa towns, we end up staying in the places that aren't that different than home.

Our first stop out of Fairfield was Kolona. Nearby Kolona is the largest Amish settlement west of the Mississippi. Despite the fact that I went to school about a half hour from true Amish country, I never made it out there, so it was pretty cool to see people out with their horse-drawn carriages. I wanted to get a picture, but the rain was still a problem, and it also seemed a bit disrespectful, so I let it be. We didn't really do much in Kolona, just looked at an Amish furniture store and had a giant cinnamon bun at the Kolona Bakery. We stopped a few miles north of town and went to the Kolona Cheese Factory, where I sampled a lot of very good cheese, probably too much considering how little I bought.

It's kind of sad that this is the only photo I got in Kolona. But I thought it was a kind of cool old gas pump. It won't accept credit cards! Also, I think I have gas on my mind, because we are constantly on the lookout for the lowest gas prices.

After leaving Kolona, our next stop was Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa. My aunt went to UI and my mom got her masters there, so she was somewhat familiar with the town, although it had changed a lot since her time. We stopped in at The Airliner, her old watering hole, for some burgers. The food was good, but the place is kind of overreliant on the fact that they have been around since 1944.

Apparently Iowa City used to be the capital of Iowa, and this is the old state capitol. It's right in the middle of campus.

From Iowa City it is a pretty short drive to Cedar Rapids, my mom's hometown. When we got there we drove around a bit, and my mom showed me her old houses, her grandparent's house, her schools, etc. There is a huge estate in town, called Brucemore, that is now owned by the Historic Preservation Trust or some such organization with a similar name. When my mom was growing up, though, it was occupied by an eccentric millionaire, who kept lions on the property. My mom lived pretty close to the estate, and she could hear the lions roaring at night. I thought that was pretty cool.

A bit of a lopsided shot of my house where my mom lived until she was 10. I took it from the car window. I couldn't get a shot of where she lived during junior high and high school--in fact, I could hardly see it--because it was obscured behind some trees. I also wasn't able to get a shot of my great grandparents' house. We stayed with my mom's oldest friend, who works at the high school that they attended, so we got to walk around in there. It was cool to see but didn't mean a ton to me; but I am a very nostalgic person so I let my mom enjoy her memories and tried to imagine what it would be like to walk down my high school hallway in forty years. It is weird to think that high school is such a personal and communal space at the same time; you have your classrooms and your locker, but hundreds or thousands of other people have also shared those spaces.

Cedar Rapids again struck me as not that different from West Hartford, not only in the setup of the town--which is very suburban--but even the landscape, which is a lot more rolling and forested than I would expect of Iowa. As much as I wish I had some down-home rural roots in my past, my mom admitted that she never really knew what life was like in Iowa beyond Cedar Rapids. So her childhood probably wasn't all that different than mine. The town has apparently developed quite a bit though. Peggy, my mom's friend, lived just off East Post Road, which in my mom's time was "like the end of the world," as she described it--beyond it was wilderness. Now, even though the population isn't that much greater, the city sprawls a lot more.

These were the sheets I picked out at Peggy's house. My choices were Peanuts, Barney, or Beauty and the Beast, so the choice was clear. Patty is saying "Happiness is being one of the gang." She has a good point. I guess Charles Schulz invented the concept of rolling thick.