After our visit with the Snedekers in South Dakota, we moved on to Sheldon, Iowa.
We had planned to meet a publisher friend of mine in Sheldon, if the timing worked out. Peter Wagner publishes The N’west Iowa Review.
The newspaper has won the award as the top non-daiIy newspaper in the country numerous times in the National Newspaper Association competition.
I tried calling Peter on my cell phone, but I only left a message and if mine was as garbled as his was and with my soft voice he probably didn’t get mine. It was a Sunday evening and we didn’t see many cell towers as we drove across Iowa the next day.
What we did see was lots of corn. We drove for hours and the view on both sides of us was corn fields. It made me wonder how many acres of Iowa farm land is planted in corn. I found out northwest and central Iowa are among the top two producing areas of corn production in the world.
We spent the night in Davenport, Iowa, on the Mississippi River. The person at the front desk of our hotel said there was a good casual restaurant called the Driftwood Inn that was close by and had a river view.
That’s just what we were looking for after the long drive through the corn fields.
The restaurant is on the banks of the river. It was so close to the water I could see fish going by.
Our next objective was to get to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in the Detroit area.
Along the way, we stopped at Beau and Lisa Alexander’s home in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. Beau is Diane’s nephew. His parents live near us in Henderson.
We got to the museum around 2:30 in the afternoon. Tammy and Brandon told us it was a must-see. The kids loved it and wanted to stop again on the way back from South Dakota.
Even if you aren’t a museum person, there’s something in The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation for everyone.
The Henry Ford is a large indoor and outdoor history museum complex and a National Historic Landmark in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. The museum collection contains the presidential limousine of John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln's chair from Ford's Theatre, Thomas Edison's laboratory, the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop, the Rosa Parks bus, and many more historical exhibits. It is the largest indoor-outdoor museum complex in the United States and is visited by over 1.7 million people each year.
If you decide to go, allow yourself much more than the two and a half hours we did. We barely made it through the main exhibit hall before the 5:30 closing time.
It included the history of the automobile, with just about every model on display. There was even one of our family cars when I was growing up, a 1955 Chevy BelAire, painted in the same original salmon and gray color scheme combination as ours.
Our grandsons really liked the assembly line where you can watch an entire Ford F150 be put together.
Our next stop was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I’ll talk about next time.
In closing this week, I want to say Happy Birthday to two special ladies in my life. My mom turned 92 on the 6th and granddaughter Brooke, was 10 on the 15th.
