The Rest of the Trip

Yesterday you saw the photos I took of an old house while on my trip to Iowa. Here is the rest of the trip in another one of my insanely long photo essays.

It is a five hour drive to my parents in Iowa. We arrived around one in the afternoon. I was exhausted and took a nap while the girls played with my Mom. When I awoke, we drove out to my brother's house and the girls got a chance to ride on the horse that my brother and his wife A bought for their daughter.

Dolly is a beautiful petite palomino and is very well trained. Above you can see A leading C while Marley tags along.

One of our favorite things to do with my parents is go to Red Rock Dam and take walks. There is always plenty to see. Above you see my Dad watching the water flow over the spillway.

He doesn't seem happy to have his photo taken.

Seven fisherman and a boy. There often large groups of various ethnic peoples who like to fish below the dam.

I didn't see anyone on this trip but sometimes people wade out into the water along the railings to fish.

Bucolic Iowa!! :)

My oldest talks non-stop. Often her conversation revolves around nothing...it is basically a narrative of what is going on in her life that exact moment or what is going on in her head. In the photo above, I had just asked my Dad if it brought back fond memories.

It started raining the first night we were there and rained on and off for the rest of our visit. My aunt wrote in the family emails yesterday that since last Thursday their part of Iowa had received 7.5 inches. So the first morning I parked the girls in front of PBS kids (which they never get to watch at home) and slept in until nearly ten (my Mom and Dad were both at work - my Mom works until noon).

When I got up, we went out driving and I took some photos in between cloudburst or out the car window.

After Mom got off work we drove to Des Moines so I could buy some yeast and ground sirloin patties at Costco (we don't have a Costco membership but Mom and Dad do).

On the way back, we stopped at the house you saw yesterday. Here are a few more interesting photos of the farmstead.

This old house was one of the neatest abandoned places I had ever seen - they had everything organized - no fear of stepping on boards with nails unless you went right up or into the buildings. They had many bundles of old barbed wire stacked in front of the house itself.

If you click on this above photo, you can see that I exposed this shot so you can see the lathe on the ceiling of the house. If I had shot at another angle you could have seen that it still had wall paper on parts of the ceiling and walls.

There were a couple of gorgeous old oaks on the property.

The old well - covered with rusty tin and rotten boards.

A cracked old pen for their porcine friends.

The next night during our walk we saw this heron sitting at the end of a bridge that juts out half-way into the river and then stops.

Beautiful clouds and sunset. Later we got poured on.

That night it rained three inches. The next morning we packed and then went for a drive while we waited for Mom to get off work.

Mom loves to watch the buzzards fly around at the dam. When we arrived, there was a large number of them sitting on the grass on the backside of the dam. Here is a shot of many of them flying.

I also took photos of the purple martins enjoying their home. This is my favorite shot because you can see his little feet as he reaches out to land.

After all the rain, you could see large groups of fish just under the water and every so often one would leap.

Unfortunately, the fishermen usually just throw the fish they don't want into the rocks to die.

The girls found this snail...

This was a house near the river. The water had swallowed most of the back yard. As you can tell the German Shepherd isn't to happy about it. Further down there was a group of kids wearing rain boots and exploring in the flooded trees with great big inner-tubes.

That afternoon, I took Mom, C, and my niece H to Grandparent's Camp and drove back up towards home. On the way, K asked me to turn on the local Christian radio station. I did. And I heard that her favorite singer was going to be at a Christian bookstore on the west side of the cities...so rather than go home we met hubby there.

I will share that part of our weekend tomorrow.