On The Road - Day Two

I do believe every road sign in the states of Iowa and Minnesota has a bird perched on top of it. Either there are a lot of birds that like to see who is on the road or the signs are made that way, sort of a fake decoy.

Today was sunny and cool. It was great driving weather regretfully there isn’t a lot to see in southwest Minnesota except for lots of soybean and corn fields. Two new additions since my last trip were ethanol plants and large wind turbines.

I missed a turn and went out of my way for about 40 miles, but I am glad I did. I went through a town on the Minnesota River called New Ulm. It was another of those beautifully picturesque places that almost make me want to move back to the rural life.

On The Road - Day One

It rained all day my first day out of Kansas City. I left I-29 at St. Joe and turned straight north on US 71 to Clarinda, Iowa. Clarinda lays claim to both the birthplace home of Glenn Miller and the Goldenrod School (the birthplace of 4-H). I then cut over to US Route 59 to the beautiful little town of Shenandoah Iowa to see if the Corn Motel was still there. It wasn’t. I remember staying there on the way back from a summer in Canada in the early Sixties. It was the first motel that we had ever stayed at that had a swimming pool. My brothers and I were I heaven.


It was a deluge of rain when I drove through Ida Grove so I couldn’t stop. The town had a general motif sort of like castles. I’ll have to research more about Ida Grove, it was rather strange. I finally stopped for the night just into Minnesota in Worthington. I had a chance to stay at an old time motel but chickened out and went to the Holiday Inn Express instead. I couldn’t resist the lure of a swimming pool.

First I dropped by the local Wal-Mart to pick up some beer (which I found out later was 3.2 just like the old days of Kansas). Almost everyone in the store was Hispanic. Worthington is a big meat processing town.

On The Road

I am dedicating this summer to the “road trip”. Both in literature and in life. We used to move a lot when I was a kid because the type of work my Dad did. And I am feeling the call to travel again; for the first time in a long time I have the opportunity (read time and money).

My first trip will be to the old lake cottage in Minnesota. Someone in our family has been spending a summer there for the past 100 years. On the way up from Kansas City I will make it into a two day car trip. I will avoid the interstate and take the blue highways as William Least Heat Moon would do. For reading material I am taking along Jack Kerouac’s famous road trip novel On the Road and a new road novel by Jim Harrison, The English Major (to see my review visit GoodReads). I’ll be shopping at used bookstores along the way to find John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie.