Happy 4th of July

Happy 4^th of July, 2012

At last we have left the corn and soy fields of Illinois and Iowa behind. No sooner do you cross from Iowa into Minnesota than the landscape begins to have rolling hills and lots of trees instead of the miles of flat, treeless farms. One of the things that has impressed me the most is the number of wind turbines you see in Iowa and Minnesota

We drove this morning from Nashua, Iowa (and probably the worst campground we have experienced so far) up to Clear Lake, Iowa on our way to Wisconsin. Clear Lake became the focus of the music world on February 3, 1959. That date was memorialized in song by Don McClean in 1972 as “the day the music died.” We had hoped to take a photo in front of the Surf Ballroom, where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, aka The Big Bopper, played on the evening of Feb. 2^nd.  When we pulled into Clear Lake, our GPS took us right into the middle of the town’s 4^th of July Parade! Our little RV was duke-ing it out with floats, fire engines, girl scouts and  a whole cadre of county sheriffs. Licia and I felt as though we were in a scene from The Music Man. 

BUT . . . . .  I had a back-up plan.  After extricating ourselves from the parade (which took about 45 minutes) we started out of town towards the Minnesota border and after a 4 mile drive and a ½ mile hike into a cornfield in 95 degree heat, we found the marker for the spot where the singers’ plane crashed. The shiny steel sculpture is a guitar and three 45 RPM records engraved with a song by each one. Licia took my photo with the marker. The site has become a shrine even though it is really hard to find but it is a site I won’t forget.

3 hours later we had crossed the Mississippi a second time and cut through Minnesota and into Wisconsin where I write this at 10:30 local time watching fireworks being set off all around us in fields adjacent to this huge campground. It is very festive.

Tomorrow starts Licia’s series of Laura Ingalls Wilder  - Little House sites and museums.  We are in Pepin, WI tonight, the town of Laura’s birth.

Hi all!  What a difference each campground is.  Yesterday’s was so bad that I literally did not get out of the RV.  There were only 7 RV’s there and the place looked like an equipment dump driving up to the office.  It was nothing like the lush green pictures of the web site.  Tonight we are in a site with almost all permanent set-ups.  Some sites have in ground sprinkle systems to keep the grass nice and green.  There are some golf carts but what we noticed right away- the people are very friendly.  Maybe it is because we are the exception and everyone seemed interested in our great adventure across America.  We even got to see fireworks right at the park.

For those of you who know Lake George, Lake Pepin looks a lot like it.  It is 30 miles long and 3 miles wide but it is really just a wide section of the Mississippi River.  It is a beautiful setting and a nice change of scenery from the corn fields.

T