In order to be gone for 3 weeks of travel, but not take 3 weeks of vacation, I needed to work some while on the road. This was one of those work half-days. We got a slightly late checkout from the Residence Inn, and I worked from the lounge in the morning. It was impressive how it seemed like they knew each time when it was time to get on a Google Meet, they would come around and vacuum some new section of rug. I ended up going outside to work on the little patio. Fortunately, it was a nice day, and I had enough laptop battery.
Finally, we get underway, but I do still have a 3:00 (EDT) meeting to attend, and the timing works out great for us as we land at the Iowa 80 World’s Largest Truckstop. We plug Rosie in (there’s both a Tesla charging station and a ChargePoint), I pop up the sun shield, and move over to the passenger seat for my meeting. Sam and Carolyn go exploring and find me a sandwich and then find some food for themselves. When I wrap up my meeting, I find that they’ve gone to the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum. It’s free to enter, so I join them there briefly. It’s really cool. All kinds of trucks from all eras. I wonder when Rosie will show up there! Of particular note were a Coca-Cola bottle truck that had room for lots of crates of bottles just open and ready for delivery, and a “Street Washing Truck” that was still in use in Menominee, WI at a time when my mom would have spent some time with her grandparents there.
As much as I’d have loved to explore the museum more, the ladies already had, and we had miles to make, so we got back on the road. Our itinerary was decided as we went along, and as we approached “West Branch, IA” along route 80, Carolyn suggested that we stop in at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. We got there just before the ranger station closed, but the ranger was super helpful, the town was super cute, and we enjoyed exploring the site. There was his boyhood home, a rendition of the sort of smithy his father would have run, a little one room schoolhouse, and the burial place for him and his wife with a clear line of sight back down to the cabin. And we were surprised to run across a statue of Isis on his site, but once you get the story, it makes a little more sense.
After exploring here, we kept going along 80 West to the other side of Des Moins and found our way to a “Kum & Go” (and an adjoining Electrify America). That was just a charging stop, and we went from there to a late, and delicious dinner at Wasabisaukee.
By dinner time, we had decided we could make it to Omaha, NE for the night, and so we did, though we didn’t roll in until close to midnight.
