Archive for the ‘Travel – IA’ Category
August 14, 2005 – Iowa State Fair
Today was the annual pilgrimage to the Iowa State Fair, now rated one of the top 10 places to visit for a family vacation along with the Grand Canyon, Colorado Rockies, and seven other places I can’t remember. Today, I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.
Here’s Claire on the mezannine of the Agriculture Building. Just over her left shoulder in a refrigerated case is the
life-size butter cow.
The best way to see the fair is on the skyglider floating above the fair.
Among the many agricultural curiosities at the fair are the big bull, big sow, big sheep, etc. Here’s this year’s big bull, weighing in at a shade under 3,000 pounds.
Today was Wells Fargo day at the fair, so we had a free concert by Jo Dee Messina.
Here are a couple of “Fair Girls.”
Garrison Kellior of the Prairie Home Companion, spoke with the winner of a 4-H family research project. He was spellbounding talking about the project and weaving his own stories into the talk. He’s a quick wit!
June 23, 2005 – Girl’s Road Trip
Grandma and all of her female grandchildren hopped in the car and headed east to Maquoketa Caves and Dubuque.
Since some of the grandkids had not been in Illinois, they drove over the river to Illinois and Wisconsin, to make it a three state road trip.
The entrance to the cave feels good as the cool air rushes out on a hot, humid day.
The trip was not all educational and wholesome. Flarp was a big attraction on the way home. (For the uninitiated, Flarp is the modern-day whoopie cushion, except a skilled practitioner can perfect a much wider range of sounds and cadences than can be coaxed from an ordinary whoopie cushion.)
Flarp causes severe laughter and lots of playacting!
June 18, 2005 – Decorah, IA
It was time to pick up Claire from music camp at Luther College in Decorah. Here she is with the choir. It must be a blast to sing with this many people!
Grandma Nana came down from Rochester to watch as well.
As the concert was quite long – pushing 4 hours including the bands, jazz bands, orchestra, and choir, Martin and I headed off to a state fish hatchery.
The hatchery is nested in a forest outside of Decorah.
The fish are raised to “full size” and released in the cold-water trout streams in Northeast Iowa. Here’s Martin looking at a tank of rainbow trout.
Very near the hatchery, a stream comes right out of a cliff at the base of a hill. It is really cool to see the water coming out of the earth and starting a stream. I’m guessing the reason the hatchery is there is that they use the very cold water coming out of the earth to raise the trout.
Not many things beat throwing sticks down a cascading waterfall!
We also walked a short ways down the stream and looked and found trout swimming. We watched patiently and quietly while a fly fisherman cast a fly over the top of a fish we were looking at. The fly made about 10 passes before the trout jumped up and ate a different fly (not attached to a fishing line) and swam away. I told Martin that his papa would have really loved to take him fishing here as he spent many days fishing the streams around Decorah.
May 8, 2005 – Pine Lake II
Half the day was at the lake. Wonderful sand castles were built…
canoeing on the lake…
and boys hanging on the beach… 
The coolest thing in dad’s eyes was a snake suspended on a branch of a sunken tree out in the lake.
 
It was a good weekend with lots of talk about the future of sustainable agriculture and ecology as attendees at this week-end’s getaway are highly engaged in the discussion at large.
Dana Jackson, Associate Director of the Land Stewardship Project gave the keynote address at the Upper Midwest Organic Conference this year.
Dana and Laura are co-authors of The Farm as Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems to Ecosystems a book that supports progressive farming practices as providing great environmental benefits.
Laura’s husband Kamyar Enshayen works on local food initiates in Iowa, including leading the Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign in Black Hawk County.
James Pritchard, environmental historian, author of A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the 20th Century and along with his wife, Diane Debinski wrote a field guide to Butterflies of the Yellowstone region.
Matt Liebman studies crop/livestock/soil interactions.
His wife, Laura Merrick works on historical forest and land use projects and is one of America’s finest squash breeders!
As for us, we’ve got this blog, a few acres, and a few animals.
May 7, 2005 – At the Cabin
This little oasis is only about 35 miles away. Emma and Claire pull all our stuff in carts “over the river and through the woods to cabin #2.”
 
The cabins were old CCC projects built using native stone. 
Emma relaxes before dinner.
 
Martin and Hyden were buddies all weekend, here is Martin sharing a book with Hayden. 
May 6, 2005 – Loaded for Bear
We’re off (mostly) for a weekend in a cabin at Pine Lake State Park. The kids and I are heading out after school, but Linda has commencement and a speaking engagement tomorrow morning, so she won’t be joining us until then.
It seems like you need the same stuff whether you go for a weekend or a week. Here we are, all ready to go! Packing is always such a delight (but you’d never know it from these smiling faces).
March 22, 2005 – Vacation Begins!
Ah, just what you hope for – it’s about 30 degrees and overcast, with wind gusts of 35 mph and a 90% chance of rain this afternoon. It’s not quite tropical, but as the old saying goes, “whatever the weather, we’ll weather the weather, whether we like it or not.” In all truth, it won’t make much of a difference as we have plenty of space and room inside the cottage do whatever.
March 21, 2005 – Vacation or Fence?
You know you are a real farmer when you’d rather spend your money on a new fence than a caribbean vacation! I started building the fence for this year’s tree planting. I ultimately decided on the cattle panels as they will be most flexible and “always on” even though they are a bit pricey. Today, I finished pulling the snow fence posts and got about 6 panels (96 feet) worth of fence hauled and up. That means I’m about 1/14 done with the fence. Here’s about half the pieces on the wagon.
Tomorrow morning I leave with Linda on a 2 day get-away to the Villages of Van Buren County. We’re renting a “cottage” and today I went shopping for food and drink. It looks like the weather is going to be crummy, so we’ll probably spend less time hiking at Lacy-Keosauqua and more time working on the farm business plan.
