Day 2, part 1: The Iowa State Fair

This whole road trip wasn’t really planned out in great detail. We had a couple of ideas of where to go and what we wanted to see. Then we had nothing. So while at Scattergood we utilized the wireless internet connection to research things to do in Iowa and Nebraska. Low and behold… the Iowa State Fair was going on! You know what that means… corn dogs, funnel cake, and could there possibly be egg roll on a stick?

Route from Scattergood to the Iowa State Fair

The only state fairs I’ve been to before were in California and Oregon. The one in California was huge but didn’t have that… je ne sais quoi… what you imagine a state fair should be. Oregon had more of that but it was small. Iowa, however. Oh man. We walked in past the gate and were greeted by an exhibit hall titled “Farming feels good”. Yup. This is a state fair.

As we were leaving I noticed an unusual number of security and media types clustered around a crowd. I asked a bystander what was going on and she said Barack Obama was in the crowd. Holy crap. And John Edwards was at the state fair early today. So, of course, I get within a few feet of Obama and snap a couple of pictures.

Day 1: Scattergood

Picking up the U-Haul involved a trip to the Englewood neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. As we drove down the block where we were supposed to pick up our 17′ truck we noticed two-thirds of the storefronts were boarded up and a guy was sitting on the bumper of our truck drinking a 40 out of a paper bag. Real nice.

Packing up the truck went smoothly and faster than I thought it was going to take. We could have fit everything in a smaller truck with some creative packing but we were somewhat inefficient with the arrangement of boxes having the luxury of a larger truck. After a bit of making sure we had everything, we hit the road to Scattergood Friends School, Cat’s old Quaker boarding school near Iowa City, where I had my first encounter with cicadas.

The next morning we took a walk to the prairie on the school grounds. The trail was a bit damp from the morning dew and my old pair of running shoes I wore for the walk never smelled quite the same after.

Route from Chicago to Scattergood