Iowa

We arrived into Cedar Rapids airport after dark and drove the 120 miles to Cedar Falls (the town we're to be living in), which is still 15 miles from Waverly (the town Glenn will be working in) and checked into our hotel which is to be our home for the next few months.

The following morning we got up early and set out to check out Glenn's office in Waverly and to scope out a bit of the country side and to see if Iowa really does live up to its 'Is this Heaven? No, it's Iowa' catch-phrase. They print this on bumper stickers. Seriously.

Every weekend we take ourselves on a roadtrip and have seen some superb scenery and have attended some events for which appropriate adjectives do not exist.

We've pitched a few baseballs on the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville:

And visited the National Farm Toy Museum:

We've ridden the world's shortest and steepest railway in Dubuque:

We've checked out a wedding at the local Scarecrow Show (exactly that, though we've decided we prefer our scarecrows traditional rather than abstract):

The Effigy Mounds National Monument (burial mounds in the shapes of animals covered in grass) was interesting:

But not as interesting (for some) as the John Deere 90th Birthday celebration:

And we're seeing lots of Iowan cornfields:

We're lucky to have had six weeks of really good weather. It's been warm enough that we're wearing t-shirts but we suspect that this might come to a screaming halt soon. Glenn has been scraping ice from the windscreen of the car with a credit card (given the current financial climate that's about all it's good for anyway) for the last couple of days and popular opinion is that we will soon graduate from credit card to shovel to snow plough.