We took a travel break to meet up with my parents. Several items hadn’t arrived by the time we left Wisconsin, including my state ID and our car insurance card (we had a temporary one, but it was only good till July). We also took far too much with us. Neither of us had ever really gone on a road trip of this magnitude before, so we took it as an opportunity to swap stuff. We got rid of anything even verging on winter or even early spring clothes and now have two small suitcases instead of one giant one and a small one.
The weather turned in Iowa our second day there. We started getting some fairly torrential rain. We did manage to get to the capitol before it got too intense. We’ve been to several other capitols (Cheyenne, Omaha and Topeka), but unlike the others, this one was obviously open, so we decided to go in. Both the inside and outside were equally lovely:
Accession to the chair in the Iowan House of Representatives has never been so easy.
Their legislature wasn’t in session at the time, so security was fairly lax and we accidentally went up to the second floor via the employee stairs. Chris sat in this particular seat before he realized we were on the wrong side of the roped off area:
Chris noticed something about the building. Have a look to see if you can tell what’s odd:
The building was designed by someone French, and to this day, the European convention of ground floor, then first, was used, rather than the American one of starting with first.
Afterwards, we tried to go into the downtown area. The rain was picking up though and we had trouble finding anywhere to stop off to have a look around. We weren’t able to see much more.
In the evening, we went to Jethro’s BBQ, a local chain, with my cousin and his wife, so even if we didn’t get to see a much of the area as we wanted to, we did get to hear about its perks from two long time residents.
They told us it has a very low crime rate, good local bike trails and proximity to a good university. They both seemed to really love their area, which is always a good sign if locals are happy to be there.
As with Omaha, a downside for us is the lack of direct flights to Heathrow. That is not an absolute deal breaker, but definitely preferable.
Here’s the video: