FALL BEAUTY

We celebrated our anniversary in Tennessee this year.

Yes, another trip! Richard Elgersma, our son-in-law, was scheduled to graduate on September 24 with a Master’s Degree from Oxford Graduate School at the Dayton Tennessee campus.
(Dayton is also (in)famous for the Scopes - Monkey trial.)


Because our wedding anniversary is on September 23, we decided to go the Chattanooga, TN., a few days before the scheduled graduation.

To make our celebration memorable we decided to book a room on the old stern-wheel-river-steamer, “the Delta Queen.” She is permanently moored in the Tennessee river in downtown Chattanooga. Rooms are available as hotel rooms for guests to spend the night and include a scrumptious full breakfast buffet in the morning. The rooms are fairly small, like ship’s cabins and we had two single beds with a passage to the bathroom between us. It was different, so more memorable, right?


Situated between two bridges, one for foot traffic and one for any traffic, it was just a walk across the river to the downtown area. “Our” side of the river was a bit more eclectic, with small shops and eateries.

The lounge on board was just like in the movies and transported us back a few years. Although we could have had our dinner on the boat we decided to go “German.” There was a new restaurant, called the “Brew Haus” where we had an excellent German meal.




We also re-visited Point Park on Lookout Mountain, where we had been before in 1968. Not much had changed except the city is bigger now.














Rick and Monique had also given us two nights in a bed and breakfast in the Amana colonies, here in Iowa and we went there to celebrate our anniversary here as well. We spend the night in Homestead in “Die Heimat B &B.” This was near the place where we had our 40th anniversary dinner and celebration with the whole family.







The days we picked to go there were fabulous; sunny and the fall colors were showing.


We went on our motor bike to really enjoy this trip, taking secondary roads to avoid traffic and to be able to really enjoy the trip. We took a side trip to Kalona, a place known for its quilting and rustic country atmosphere.

Again a gloriously sunny day.
We had dinner that night at Phat Daddy in Marengo, another memorable place. Our “Indian Summer” was only marred by very high winds, which blew some of the beautiful fall colors away after we had come home again.


Although it is now getting a little bit cooler, we still have a lot of sunshine and reasonable temperatures to enjoy this beautiful Iowa fall. We take short rides in our surrounding areas to enjoy this beautiful fall.

Busy August AND September

It has been over one month since my last blog entry. I am truly sorry about that. August remained busy and so was September. We did many things and were involved with many activities.


Our motorcycle weekend during August 19-21, with our kids was a great success! We stayed in the same B&B as last year, and only used this one for two nights. Then, on the day we were there we really checked out the local area. Riding most of the day, with stops in rustic and eclectic places.

While we were riding I noticed some worse oscillation of the tires during our rides, but I had been assured that due to some “cupping” in the tires this was not all that uncommon. Yet because of these oscillations we decided to get new tires anyway, to ensure a better ride on future excursions. When I took the bike in to have the mechanic look at it I got a really big surprise: there was a large defect on my rear tire. Apparently the thread had separated from the tire lining and wore about a three inch (7 cm) hole in the tread. Miraculously we were still holding air. We had gone over 70 mph (115 km/h) on the previous weekend on the way home. We truly believe that the hand of God kept the tire intact until we could replace it. We had planned to ride to Minnesota during the following week, to see our children and grandchildren there. But it was way to windy to ride all that way, so we went by car. We only went for two overnights because they were planning to visit us over Labor Day weekend. We gave them some belated birth-day gifts. Arn made a NASCAR of his favorite driver and Will made a movable wooden lion.

The week leading up to their visit we were once again active with helping to package meals, for “Meals from the Heartland.” This is an annual event, which is patterned after “Feed the Children.” Started as a local church project, the community adopted it and for the past few years about 10.000 volunteers package over 4 million meals during Labor Day weekend. They are shipped to areas of need and all the materials are paid for prior to the event.


After that we were busy entertaining our grandchildren, while their parents took time to relax. I had finished my N-Gage railroad layout and the boys were happy to take time to run some trains. We had also scheduled some time for crafts with them. They made a bill-fold and a coin purse.
We had planned it so that they would make each others’ project. They had a lot of fun making each others special money carriers.


September started with beautiful cool weather, but we were not able to ride our motor bike because of a defect in the ignition switch. The part took a week to get here but all is well gain now. Fortunately it was covered under our warranty! The bike was ready or me to ride as an escort bringing the Dignity Wall into Des Moines. I’ll do my next blog on that event.

JULY is for slowing down

It seems that my life is less exciting, because I have not blogged since the middle of June. But that is not correct. As I stated in the previous blog, life has been hectic. We planned some home improvement projects and also scheduled some personal vacation time later this year.

Our activity with the DELTA kids was great fun, although we did not sleep much during the two overnights we spent with them. When the rain let up we went for motor cycle rides. July has been much better weather wise. So, we have been on a few longer rides through the country side of Iowa.




On the weekend of the 4th of July we went on a group ride with “Hope’s Angels.” The group is primarily comprised of a group of motor cycle enthusiast of HOPE Lutheran Church in West Des Moines. We also attend here. Although it is a very large church, it does not seem like a very large church. Just click here if you would like a neat description of what goes on there.

During the month of June we did so many things, that I was wondering how come we had not gotten paid yet; I honestly though that much more
time had passed than it actually had.

Time to slow down and smell the roses.

Seeing Iowa

Celebrating the 65th Birthday of my bride, yesterday, August 12. I gave her a “renewed computer.” Her computer was confused; it had Windows XP twice, due to a previous attempt of restoration. Some of the applications were flip-flopping and some could not be reinstalled. With today’s memory hungry programs a 60 GB drive seems small and two full operating systems and some areas of the hard disk unaccessible, we were wasting space . But this computer has excellent speakers and a good screen. What’s even more, she likes it! So, we “killed” the hard-disk and completely overwrote it with 0s. Then we went on to a clean reinstall of only the system and programs she wanted. It moves great again and there is room to spare! We could have upgraded to Win7, with a new machine, but there are many older programs we like that work in XP or earlier only, so we went the restoration way. I like my 18.4 screen and Win7 works OK for me. And, I now also have access to some of the older utilities, on the other computer.

Some of you, who follow us on face-book, know that we went on a four day motorbike trip with our local children, Rick and Monique. We went to North East Iowa, because the roads there are more curvy and it is also more hilly. Even though the skies were threatening rain, we only experienced about 3 minutes of rain during our entire ride. There was some local flooding, but not as much as now.

During the last few days we had state wide torrential rains and many roads are now closed, even a part of the interstate just north of Des Moines. Ames is flooded, many small low-lying areas are dealing with feet of water and some residential areas are flooded.

During our trip we spend our nights in selected Bed and Breakfast locations and tried to visit some wineries on during each day trip.





This gave us great goals for each day and we also did some unplanned things. Like eating lunch in a “Schoolhouse Cafe,”on the way to Fredericksburg, where we spend our first night in the Farm House B&B.

The next day we visited the great little town of Spillville, to look at marvelous clocks carved by the Bily brothers and museum items regarding Antonin Dvorak.

We also stopped in Marquette, McGregor and Garnavillo, names which seem out of place in Iowa...



Let’s not forget the motorcycle museum in Anamosa which we visited after spending the night in Maquoketa.

We put over 700 miles on our bikes and saw a lot of the local small towns, the Mississippi river, Pike’s Peak (yes! In Iowa), and lots of corn fields as well.

When we got home late Sunday afternoon, we were all tired and relaxed, reliving this great trip.



Since then we both got a year older - both 65 now! So, after being retired for 10 years, we have now arrived at retirement age. We did ride our bicycles to breakfast in Adel on my birthday and went to Ruby Tuesday for dinner on my lovely wife’s birthday. It has been very hot and wet in the heartland, the wettest year on record. We have a lot of local flooding, but so far our area is dry, no water in the basement at all.