The Move to Seattle Gets Very Corny

We continued hauling our possessions across the continent today.

Goodbye Missouri.

Hello Iowa!

The closer we got to tonight's destination the more signs we saw of Sturgis. Sturgis already had a pretty bad reputation of being a pandemic super spreader event last year. This year the danger these motorcycle people posed was much more visceral: I was driving a very large vehicle and it was hard to see them on the road.

We said "no thank you" to Nebraska this time around.

South Dakota!

Forgive me Nelly, for I have sinned. I'm still from the Lou and proud, I swear! Look, even Nelly sold his St. Louis house and moved to California so I don't want to hear it.

We were under a pretty tight schedule to get our moving truck across creation but we did have a little bit of time for tourism. This may be my first time ever being in South Dakota, as far as I can recall. The Corn Palace lives in Mitchell, SD and is very corny and very regal. It's essentially a gymnasium with murals made out of corn covering both outside and inside of the building.

They are eager to inform you that they are the world's only corn palace. I had assumed that this was because it's a ridiculous idea that only one madman was allowed to bring to fruition. Wikipedia learned me good once again, though. "From 1887 to 1930, at least thirty-four corn palaces were built across the Midwest United States; only the Mitchell Corn Palace has remained intact." Apparently Johnny Cash has played here three times. So corny.

"Twelve naturally-occurring shades of corn are grown by local farmers to create the artwork."

You know, if you think about it, the story of this building with a bunch of corn cobs nailed to it is really the story of America.

We bought some corn to be our very own, but it didn't last very long.

Another odd roadside attraction that I couldn't resist was Wall Drug located in Wall, South Dakota.

The little store in a dinky little town was on the highway leading to Mount Rushmore. They lured people to the store by advertising free ice water.

We had a very fancy dinner of buffalo burgers and a bottle of wine.

I've never heard of chokecherry before. With a name like that you wouldn't think they'd be great.

They're still giving away ice water in these humorously tiny cups.

The truck didn't have cruise control which was much suck. Just keeping our speed stable was a lot of work and a lot of pedal pushing. One thing that was nice about South Dakota and some of the other sparsely populated states was that the speed limit on the highway was 80. We had weighed this poor truck down with so much crap that I could just floor it and never make it over 90. That was actually super convenient.

We laid our heads down in Rapid City, SD, on the other end of the state.

The closer we got to Sturgis the thicker the clouds of motorcycles became.

The hotel had this odd red light in the bathroom that I guess was for heat? 

You could turn the normal light off and just sit on the toilet and pretend you were in the Shining.

Rural Iowa: a Taste of the Netherlands and Carpenter Gothic

We had a long drive home from Des Moines, but we were able to swing by some interesting spots on the way.

I was impressed that there was a place as cool as Pella in rural Iowa. The town of 10,000 was founded by immigrants from the Netherlands, and they decided to show it. Many of the buildings are Dutch styled.

They have a little take-out-only Dutch restaurant called DutchFix.

Lydia ordered an interesting one: "Stampot, creamy mashed potatoes topped with traditional dutch spiced beef and dutch red cabbage slaw".

When I saw this thing, the Tulip Toren, I knew that this town was not messing around with this whole Dutch schtick. It says Tulip Time at the top, which I guess is some sort of annual Dutch festival. I guess it's so legit that Dutch royalty has been in attendance.

These madmen even had a fake little canal area set up.

And a windmill!

We continued our drive through Iowan country roads and I saw one of those cool brown roadsigns near Eldon, Iowa that indicates something awesome was afoot. It said "American Gothic House". Definitely going to that. I love road trips that include a bit of a time cushion. Lydia is a very plan oriented clock watcher, which is good because it makes it even more fun to destroy her plans with unexpected adventures!

We are fast becoming the foremost experts in Grant Wood. Because... we went to his studio home in Cedar Rapids that one time and then checked out a bunch of his work at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.

We first checked out the little museum, which told a little bit of the story of the painting and of the two people featured in it.

The model for the daughter (often mistaken to be the man's wife) was Wood's sister Nan Wood and the man was his dentist. I guess Wood lied and told the dentist that he wouldn't be recognizable, and so the dentist was pissed off about it like forever.

There were racks of clothes of different sizes and a few nice old lady volunteers there to slap it all onto us. We hustled out, they took a few shots of us, and that was that. I thought it was a super fun little American experience.

I guess Grant just sketched the house once because he was amused that that giant gothic window was sitting on such a dinky little house. He never returned to the house. I don't think that the models even met each other until years afterwards.

Wikipedia seems to think that this is Carpenter Gothic, where the "abundance of North American timber and the carpenter-built vernacular architectures based upon it made a picturesque improvisation upon Gothic a natural evolution. Carpenter Gothic improvises upon features that were carved in stone in authentic Gothic architecture."

And then, as Wikipedia research often causes, I really went down the rabbit hole of nerdery. I'd always wondered why the style was called "Gothic" in the first place, because the Goths were a Germanic tribe that destroyed the Roman Empire and surely weren't doing a lot of bathing let alone architecture. Sure enough, the term was used as an insult of a more German style of architecture by Italians and other fans of the more classic Roman style. It was meant to mean "barbaric". Very cool.

I think we did decently. I'm still a little annoyed that our photographer didn't tell me to look straight at the camera. There wasn't a painting out there to use as reference so I didn't really know what I was doing from memory. Oh well.

America can be pretty cool sometimes.