Corn, corn, corn

Today was another day that we spent almost entirely in the car, with me almost entirely sleeping. As I've mentioned in previous posts, this is generally fine with me because I am still resting up from my strenuous week in Madrid with everybody running around and buying things, and my brother Hondo's visit, and I could go on.

This is a picture of me and my Mom right after we drove over the Missouri River bridge on the border of Iowa. Lots of flooding out there and we had to drive dozens of miles out of our way to avoid washed out bridges and roads.

We drove from early Nebraska on through Iowa, ending up right on the eastern border of Iowa on the edge of the Mississippi River, where we are now snoozing out in another nice motel found on the Internet.

Our trip is running a little longer than it might because Mom and Dad are going almost entirely on state routes, avoiding the Interstates. They explain that that way you can see all the towns, and drive right next to beautiful farming fields and talk about what the people might be doing out there, and I can see the point, because Interstates are just about always only about which trucks to pass, and which trucks to avoid.

So when we started out in western Nebraska it was all about trains, because our highway was right next to the main train route, and it was one big (BIG!) train every ten minutes, trains filled with coal going toward the sun that it would take us five minutes to pass, other empty coal trains going away from the sun that we passed in a minute, trains full of grain, trains full of every kind of car. This went on for a couple of hours (as near as I can judge, since I was asleep a lot of the time).

Then it was all about corn. Corn for cattle, corn for ethanol, popcorn corn -- hundreds of miles of corn. (Unlike New England, nobody was selling corn for people by the side of the road.) Mom and I posed for a corn shot, with me looking back at the 500 miles of corn we had already traveled.

Eastern Iowa still had corn, but it was also about hay pastures and grazing cattle and beautiful rolling hills and pretty little farm houses.

Pretty wonderful country we live in, huh?