We passed the 3000-mile mark last night as we headed into Osceola, which is south of Des Moines in the middle of Iowa. Mile after mile of corn with an occasional hay field. Very beautiful! Just before we hit Iowa, we stopped in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit with Lenie’s
cousin, Sue Center. She just retired as the law librarian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her husband, Bud, is a lawyer. Lenie has a lot of successful professional people on her side of the family. I have a few, but we mostly have rabble-rousers and revolutionaries. I have a relative who was hung as an IRA terrorist many years ago, before anyone coined the word “terrorist.” Back then they were called freedom fighters, but that was before the Twin Towers came down. Funny how your perspective changes. Irish freedom fighters used to raise money in this country so they could blow up British buildings, but now the Irish don’t do much of that sort of stuff. They found prosperity by educating their people so that Germans and others located businesses in that once wretchedly poor country to take advantage of an educated work force. Now everyone is prosperous and happy and explosive-free.

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From Madison we went to Dubuque, Iowa, a town of about 50,000 on the Mississippi River that is a little depressed looking but nice nevertheless. The big attraction there is the National Mississippi River Museum, which is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, where we toured the William M. Black, a 1934 riverboat steamer. Very interesting tour of the pilothouse, engine room (huge steam generators), crew’s quarters, galley, etc. This particular steamer was a dredge that took a 31-foot wide by 9-foot deep bite out of the river bottom. It sucked the mud up like a vacuum cleaner with two huge pipes, then spat it out on the shore with another huge pipe. It operated 24/7 on the river back in the 30s and beyond.

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As Mark Twain wrote extensively about topics based on the Mississippi, I had my photo taken with his statue on the museum grounds. The guy who gave us the steamer tour had his hair curled and mustache trimmed so he looked a bit like Mark Twain. I don’t think anyone will ever shave their head and put on a goofy grin to look like me. But at least I got to hang out with Mark for a brief sit.

States like Minnesota and Wisconsin are fairly densely populated, not with big cities but with many many small towns. Iowa was too but not
as dense. Now we’ve made it through Missouri and as far as Kansas and the countryside is starting to open up. I miss my fairly unpopulated
Oregon already.

Water quality and taste of water also vary all over the place. Duluth has delicious water, but most other places have this bland or poor
tasting stuff. I have a spring at home and the water is very tasty and pure.

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We had a bit of a scare today. Lenie had some jaw pain, tingling in her fingers, and chest discomfort so we stopped in an emergency room
hospital in Bethany, Missouri where they did an EKG, brain cat scan, chest x-ray, and blood work to make sure nothing was going on.
Everything checked out fine but she needs to have a full medical and cardiology checkup when we get back home. She too has heart disease
in her side of the family. It took a couple of hours at the hospital and it was a good wakeup call for us. No one is immune from potential
heart or stroke problems, and you might as well get it checked out. Heart attack and stroke prevention are a lot easier on you than the real thing.