Jill and I stopped for breakfast at McDonald's - we each picked up a McMuffin or something, a large coffee, and an orange juice. I go into this detail in order to foreshadow events of the future, one involving the orange juice and the other involving the coffee. I'll tell you about the orange juice in a week or so, but the coffee is relevant because it did not have the intended effect: Jill was asleep in a matter of minutes after finishing her breakfast and I was extremely sleepy as I plowed along I-29 and I-80 to Des Moines. We were pressed for time, but we did get to the airport in time for Jill to get to her plane back to Philly.
After spending some down time in Des Moines (at the library, at the mall), I headed northeast toward my eventual destination the next morning: the tri-point of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, very close to Dubuque. I got lost a little bit (think Children of the Corn) - the county roads of Iowa, particularly those close to creeks and rivers, tend to snake around a bit, and I actually found myself disoriented, going in a circle at one point northeast of Marshalltown. It was fun.
I spent the night in Waterloo, in a perfectly reasonable $29 room at the EconoLodge (I needed sleep), and woke up on Sunday to a foggy and misty morning. I drove through some cool old Iowa towns like Independence, which had some cool main street architecture and a nice mill at the falls of the Wapsipinicon River.
