The Trip Home

My sister Susan and I, along with her dog Blackberry, headed home from Duluth, Minnesota, back to Fort Collins this past Saturday afternoon. On our way, we stopped off again in Clear Lake, Iowa (a really, really nice town), where I stopped at the Clear Lake Cemetery to see if I could find the graves of Viola Thayer, my Great Aunt who died at the age of 17, and Alec Nelson, her grandfather (my great great grandfather), who came to Clear Lake with his daughter Sophie in 1879. It was, of course, like looking for a needle in a haystack, and I have decided that I will need to get professional help (genealogical, not psychiatric). The photo on the left is of that 19th and early 20th century cemetery. 

We were planning to stay the night at the Motel 6 in Stuart, Iowa, where we stayed on the way to Duluth, and from experience knew that there were only two restaurants in town, neither of which had a patio. Therefore, we stopped in Des Moines, Iowa (hometown of Bill Bryson, my very favorite travel writer), and dined at Lua Brewing, which has a really nice dog friendly patio, as seen in the photograph on the right. Driving through an old 19th century neighborhood - with beautiful, mansion-like Victorians - to get there, and feeling the energy on the patio at Lua, I was shocked to find that Des Moines is actually a really nice city. Who woulda thunk it? The musical group in the photo, by the way, is from Rochester, Minnesota, and pretty damn good, but I can't remember their name. You'll have to call Lua for that.

The next day, we left Stuart, Iowa and drove across the state of Nebraska (which is not fun) and across the Eastern Plains of Colorado, which is actually torture. I took the photograph on the left on the road between Sterling, Colorado and Fort Collins. My sister wondered why I was taking that photo (while driving at 70 miles per hour on a two lane highway), since there is nothing there, and I told her that that was the point. To the east of both Fort Collins and Denver are the Great Plains, where there is nothing but cattle - no trees, few people, and on this road, very few other cars. In the southeast part of Colorado is the site of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. A very desolate, lonely place indeed.

It seemed to take forever to get back to Fort Collins - I kept thinking it would appear over the next rise, but it never did. Thanks to the time change back to Mountain Daylight, we arrived just a little bit before sunset, and both Susan and I and Blackberry agreed that after that trip across the plains, we needed to immediately head to the patio at Odell Brewing Company, which we did. I took the photograph on the right of Odell's wine bar, which is separate from the beer garden, in order to prevent fights between wine and beer drinkers. Things are politicized about EVERYTHING these days. As we sat there, drinking our pints, I realized that thanks to Blackberry, we had visited three brew pub patios three days in a row in three different states. What a good dog!