“You’re going where?” I was asked time and again. “What’s in Iowa?” was the query. I really didn’t know the answers before I went, but now I think it was one of the best holidays we ever had.
Wonderful people hosted us in their homes. During our 13 days in four Iowa cities, we stayed with four different families, which was the same for each of the five couples on the trip. Our various hosts were ultra-friendly and completely accommodating. They cooked for us, they drove us to interesting events and locations, they partied with us, they took us to stimulating restaurants, and they gave us beds to sleep on.
Exceptional tours and events were set up for us. We toured an ice cream factory, a distillery, the Isadora Bloom factory, the gigantic John Deere combine assembly factory, a button museum, a massive Cargill hog slaughterhouse, an Amish furniture factory, an Amish farm, a car-crusher factory called Al-John, a giant city market, a state Capitol building, a turn-of-the century mansion, a Federal Jobs Centre, a local college, and a hot-air balloon museum.
Several excursions blew us away. We went to a wharf in the Quad Cities and boarded a magnificent yacht for a peaceful cruise down the Mississippi. In Muscatine, a city of 22,000, a local Rotarian owned a paddle-wheeler boat, and we were given a private tour of the Mississippi in that location.
Important museums and art galleries took our breath away. We were taken to West Branch, Iowa, a small town where one of the U.S. presidents, Herbert Hoover, was born. It was neat to follow his career as a businessman and reformer, and to explore the years of 1929-1933 when he was President.
Alexia and I were privileged to visit the Grant Wood Centre in Eldon, Iowa. In this small town, the artist Grant Wood saw the house with the strange windows that he used in his painting “American Gothic.” Two representative Iowa figures stand humorless in front of this quaint Iowan house. The woman has her hair done up in a bun and the man has rimless glasses, coveralls, and holds a pitchfork.
We donned 1930’s farm clothes, stood in front of the house, and had our picture taken. In this case, it might be called “Canadian Gothic—photo.”
The most exciting event occurred in Indianola, Iowa. Shortly after arrival, we were hustled to the Indianola hot-air balloon grounds where balloonists brought their hot-air balloons for us to ride. They took us across town to a launch site and began setting up. All the equipment was stored in small trailers and vans, and soon they had the balloons laid out on the grass. Next came getting the carrying-basket ready with the propane tanks and the 18,000 BTU flame thrower.
I helped hold the 90,000 cubic feet-of-air balloon open as they blew cold air into it using two large fans. Then our pilot Al injected hot flame into the middle and it began to expand and flipped straight up. We clambered into the basket, and Al’s crew could barely keep the it in place till we were set.
Then a few blasts of the flame thrower above our heads, and the balloon swiftly rose. In a few seconds, we were hundreds of feet in the air looking out over the city and watching the earth recede beneath us.
How to describe the sensation? It was simply peaceful and extremely quiet up there. It felt like a kind of weightlessness, what an eagle might feel soaring on an air current.
It was perfect—and fit in perfectly with all the other activities we’d experienced in Iowa and with Iowans