July 11, 2020

Weeks ago when we were planning this vacation, I tried to find something to do in Iowa that went with our National Park theme.  I landed on Effigy Mounds.  None of us had any idea what it was.  But first, the drive there.  We were headed through a small town in Iowa when we started to notice that the sky was a little iffy...we got nervous but also very lucky as we basically skirted around the store and just had to drive through a little bit of it.

 

Effigy Mounds is on the shores of the Mississippi which isn't as much fun to type as I would have thought.  It's an old Native American burial ground representing the different tribes.  The bodies are in "mounds" that have been made to look like animals.  Even today, Native Americans will leave tied ribbons around the fences near the mounds.

 

 

 

 

 

Riley loved that the falling guy looked like he was wearing dress shoes.

 

You can't see it very well but this set of mounds was shaped like a bear.

 

Okay, now for an adventurous and yet funny story.  Rick decided to go for a bike ride.  NOW, we all probably know that he had planned for a bike ride the whole time but he told us at the Mounds that he wanted to go for a bike ride AND that he planned for the ride to end at Toppling Goliath which is a brewery that he likes.  Riley and I decided on the spot that we would go for a bit to the local state park to see a cool lookout.  I dialed the park up on the GPS (which was the opposite direction that Rick was going) and off we went.  Everything was going smoothly as we wandered through the local town and started climbing up the hill in our rental car.  I mentioned to Riley that I thought it was odd that there were no street signs for the State Park.  Then the GPS had us turn down some back roads and I started to get nervous.  We were in the middle of nowhere on the Mississippi banks, dirt roads and no one knew where we were.  Luckily, the destination was just ahead which happened to be someone's cabin.  I backed out of the dirt road as quickly as possible, switched to a different app on my phone and drove another 20 minutes to our real destination.

 

Interestingly, we arrived at Pike's Peak which is where the Mississippi (I HATE typing that) river meets the Wisconsin River.  Apparently they don't like to mingle as can be seen below.

 

We passed this pink elephant on the way back to try to find Rick.

 

Normally I don't like the food at breweries because they try to be fancy and make crafty food.  While we were waiting for Rick to get there, we just went ahead and ordered a pizza and a pretzel with beer cheese and hot mustard.  It was okay and the pizza was okay.  Rick was thrilled that it was ready when he got there.  He mowed through it and got his flight of beers ordered.  There was social distancing galore, which was great.

 

Eventually we were back on the road and ran into a REAL rain storm.  It was no fun.  I kept asking Rick to just pull over but he showed me the radar and that it was a good 30 minutes of bright red...so through it we went.