Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Three weeks on the road!
Woke to some sunshine and heavy fog, particularly in low areas. Pretty country-side and we stopped at Long Hollow Scenic Overlook near the quaint town of Elizabeth - sure beats Elizabeth, NJ!
Greg is increasingly concerned with an unusual rattle sound
from the front end.
We go to the town of Galena and, after visiting a home where
Ulysses Grant lived for a time after the Civil War, we inquired about a
mechanic at the Visitor’s Center . She
sent us to Leibold Auto Care. After a quick
test drive, they found the problem was a mostly missing rubber part that holds
the sway bar to the body. They made some
calls and told us to come back at 1:00 and they would have the parts. This was about 11:00.
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| Grant Home |
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| Grant Home Dining Room; Rooms furnished with mostly Grant belongings. This china was used in the white house during his presidency. |
So we went downtown Galena.
Did a tour of the Desoto House, a
nicely restored huge hotel. They showed
two short films about the town and Desoto House which gave a good picture of
this once prosperous steamboat town. The
town now is quite a shopping mecca with lots of quaint and interesting stores
and restaurants. It was very busy.
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| Part of the facing is tin. |
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| The Belvedere, one of several beautiful old homes in Galena. |
We had some sandwiches in the Trek, then Greg dropped me at
the local library while he took the Trek back to the mechanic. They did a great job in only 20 minutes or so
! Alleluiah! I finished one day of the blog before
Greg came back and we were on our way again.
National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque
was our next stop. This is a large complex by the port of Dubuque. The first building held a number of
aquariums housing fish and other animals of the Mississippi River. There was a special exhibit upstairs about
turtles of the world – some strange-looking creatures! In early Greece, turtles
were considered citizens of Hell. There are over 260 types of turtles , with
almost 40% being in danger of extinction.
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| Perfect pose! |
There was also a lot of history of the development of the
river; early settlers, a section on the Mississippi and the Civil War, and a lot about the ecology and concerns
about river usage, barge traffic, etc. There were some outdoor exhibits of
steamboat engines and other large items, and some information about the
explosion of the Sultana. This was a
steamboat that was carrying Union POW’s north after the end of the Civil War
and its boilers exploded somewhere north of Memphia. More lives were lost than in the Titanic.
The second building was about rivers of the world. There was an interesting film about canals as
well, including the building of the Erie Canal.
There were some salt-water aquariums here and a lot of children’s
activities.
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| Steamboat engines |
We were tired, so did the second building rather
quickly. Called Mom from the parking lot
and then headed toward Dyersville , where Field of Dreams was filmed.
We arrived there at 6:00, just as the gift shop was closing, and we were the only ones there to wander around the bases. Of course the corn fields that surround the baseball field in the movie are all planted now, but the corn was only and inch or two high, so looked quite different than the film.
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