After the flood

We were able to return to the Glen on the 16^th of September. The flood fortunately did not cause any major damage to the property. We moved back in to pack, because we already had made plans for an extended road trip starting on September 19 to go to South-west Utah.

 There are a number of National Parks in this region and although we had visited Monument Valley, Lake Powell, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and the southern part of the Escalante National Park, we had never visited Zion, Brice Canyon, Cedar Breaks or some of the other parks in this region.

We opted to take the scenic route, rather than traveling on the express way, which would get us to Cedar City, Utah, at the end of a two day trip. 

We thought that Cedar City would be a good stopping point because of easy access to most of the sites in SW Utah from there. We spent five nights here at a Bed and Breakfast and were able to make day visits to Zion, Kolob, Cedar Breaks, and do some special sight seeing on the way to these special spots.

During our trip to SW Utah, we found so many scenic sights on the way, that we decided to take three days on the way back to experience these sights in more detail. The last 2 days we would take to get home from the Moab area, after seeing the Arches National Park again.

We took way to many pictures, which is a bane as well as a benefit of digital photography, but I'll refrain from sharing too many, – even one a day would be 11 pictures. How can one share the beauty of creation in such a limited way? I did not even finish our Mediterranean Cruise travel blogs yet...

Maybe I'll spend a blog on each of the special places we visited, it would give me data for about 10 more blog posts. I'll plan to finish last year's cruise as well.

Happy Birthday to me

Because nearly two weeks have past since my last update and because I celebrate my 68th birthday today (Aug 5), I thought I would do a quick update.

We have had absolutely fabulous weather during the past two weeks and have gone out on both our motorcycle and on our bicycles.  

The previous week we pointed our motorcycle west and visited the Löss Hills in western Iowa.  After stopping off to see a Danish windmill and a picture with (a replica) of the statue to “The Little Mermaid.”  The original is in Kopenhagen, Denmark.


This statue is to commemorate the fairy tale by Hans Christiaan Anderson, who was of Danish descent, and whose story was brought to fame by Walt Disney. 
We went on to Bronson, in NW Iowa.  
There we spent the night with dear friends.  The next day we went back to our home in Johnston, but we had to stop at the (non-continental but none-the-less important) Missouri - Mississippi divide in central Iowa.  

Then last week we rode around the central Des Moines area.  The trip took us around Gray’s Lake and into waterworks park.  Waterworks park reminds my of my home area in the Netherlands.  Flat, rustic, and lots of water!  Just a few pictures to feast your eyes.

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

So, now it is the middle of August. My bride and I both celebrated our 66th birthdays. We did so in places many miles apart! We had been invited to go to a hoe-down at Corrie’s brother’s house in Jenison, Michigan. This was scheduled to take place on August 13. We decided to go a few days early so we could celebrate Corrie’s birthday in Michigan on August 12.

For my birthday on August 5, we went to Hickory Park in Ames for dinner and visited White Oaks winery on the way home. The dinner consisted of a mixed platter of barbequed food, chicken, pork, and including some of the best ribs in the state. The desert menu was our place-mat, so we ate with dessert in mind.

After this great experience off to the winery.

They have a life band at the White Oak winery on Friday nights. When we got there they were playing “our” music; so we got to dance. Monique and I even did a twist... I used some muscles which I did not know I had. They were aching on Saturday, so I must have really had a good work-out. Not too bad for 66, but I had to work of some of the calories, didn’t I ? We had planned to ride our motorbikes, but because there was a solid rain coming down, we had to go on four wheels. We hope to make up for this on this coming weekend. We plan to do a similar trip as last year. (See my blog of August 13, 2010)

For Corrie’s birthday we were in Michigan visiting with family. She celebrated in a nice restaurant in Ionia surrounded by brothers and sisters (and in-laws as well...) We had to hold the hoe down inside, because there were storms in the weather forecast. Most every liked the air-conditioned gym better; no mosquitos to contend with either. On Saturday morning Corrie’s sister, who has been a life-long beautician, “lowlighted” her hair. It turned out really great. She looks younger than her age.

We visited some very nice lake side properties visiting with relatives. On Monday we went to Ludington to visit with my cousin and his wife. We had not seen each other for about 45 years. We took a nice boat ride and enjoyed a scrumptious dinner.

Because we were in Ludington we planned to cross the lake (Lake Michigan) to Wisconsin, rather than drive back to Chicago and fight the traffic there. It was a long day! The boat trip on the SS Badger was great. Sunshiny day with little wind. We stayed on deck the entire crossing, which lasted about 4 ½ hours. Getting there early and waiting for the car to get off-loaded added about another hour or so to this part of the trip. Then driving home, another 8 hours with a stop for pizza on the way. After we unpacked and relaxed we needed to prepare for our motor-bike weekend trip with our kids.

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.

Mid Winter Thoughts (2)

Winter is waxing and waning. We live in the “Heartland” and as such have moderately severe winters. But we are south of Minnesota and that really makes a difference. It seems like most of the big storms missed our neck of the woods, at least partially. We have been spared the large amounts of snow. Fortunately, nothing like last year; when we had snow falling in foot amounts.
The news informs us that a lot of areas south of us are worse of with snowfall than we are.
So much for going south, this winter! We did stay in during the last blizzard, which came through here Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Got a lot of pictures edited and made collages of our trip-to-Holland pictures. Some of these pictures have been posted in the blogs of this fall. We are going to a midwinter tropical event tonight. The central Iowa wineries have a “Heart of Iowa Wine trail Event.” This event takes place in the warm environment of the Des Moines Botanical Center.

(I included a picture from last year.) An evening of fun and faux tropical environment in the middle of the winter in the middle of the country.

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.