Monday, 24 September 2018

Bridges and John Wayne


9-22-2018

Today is Carole and Jerry’s anniversary and we celebrated by going to John Waynes birthplace, Winterset, Iowa. We toured his museum and the house he was born in. John weighed 13 pounds at birth and a woman Dr delivered him in his home, no hospital around at that time. His home was unique because of the way it was built. The front door looked out over the corner it was on instead of being in the middle of a flat wall. 
After our tour we headed to The Winterset Rotary Hedge Maze that consisted of 1,850 privet hedges. The maze was not hard to find our way out of!  
We walked over to the Cuter-Donahue Covered Bridge built in 1870 with a peaked room and held together with wooden pegs.
After viewing the bridge we drove up to the three story stone Clark’s Tower for a view of the valley. 
On the way back we passed a large stone commemorating the discovery of the Delicious Apple Tree in Madison County.
We headed into town for lunch and tried three restaurants before we found one where we could eat. One was closed today for a family party, one was full, and the third was not expecting so many people and they were full. We asked the lady that was about to seat us and she said she was the seater, waitress trainer, and cook. Since no one had food and the place was full we decided to try the only other restaurant in town. It was a Mexican restaurant and the food was great and cheap!
The other bridges are scattered about the county and we found each one! 




































This area is also the birthplace of John Wayne so we visited his home and museum.



We returned to the RV for a short break and headed out to have dinner with friends, Jo and Randy, from our Sanibel crowd. It is nice to have friends to visit in about every state!

John Deere Plant

9-21-2018
We toured the John Deere plant today and it was just amazing to see how they make their products. They are extremely busy and everything they are building has already been sold! Their quality control is amazing. Every tool used has blue tooth hooked to it and a computer reads what is being done. The item is not able to move to the next step if the computer does not register that it has been prepared appropriately at the previous station. Just an amazing plant that we saw and we only saw one of 6 of their plants.














After touring John Deere we left the Flying J in Waterloo, Iowa for the two hour drive to Des Moines, Iowa. We pulled in to the Iowa State Fair Grounds Campground and it has room for over 2000 rigs. The big problem we noticed is that the entire area is hilly, grassy,  and it was hard to find two even spots. After we parked we ate dinner and then found a Red Box and rented the movie, ‘Tag”. Carole and Jerry came over and we watched the movie, ate popcorn and then went to bed!

Dickeyville, WI

From 1925-1930 Father Matthias Wernerus erected The Grotto and Shrines in Dickeyville, WI. The Grotto is dedicated to love of God and love of country. The Grotto is constructed of stone, mortar and bright colored object from all over the world. Father Matthias used colored stones, shells and he even used the round balls that used to be found on the top of the stick-shift in cars.