It’s a Big Dam Country — Day 8

Most­ly dri­ving today. A few inter­est­ing detours. Some planned some not.

I left Pano­ra around 9. Made my way to West Des Moines via some love­ly park­ways to nowhere. Found a Barnes and Noble with a Star­bucks and got an iced lat­te. Offi­cial­ly sum­mer now. Tried to plan a rea­son­able route for gen­er­al east­er­li­ness and failed. So I decid­ed to go with the “what’s about 100 miles east of here?” game. 

That would be Pel­la, IA home of Pel­la Win­dows. So I stopped, ille­gal­ly, and get this quick shot of the corp head­quar­ters for my friend Paul who works for Mil­gard Win­dows.

(pel­la)

This was my first view of the Mis­sis­sip­pi riv­er in Fort Madi­son. Then the GPS rout­ed me away from the riv­er and I end­ed up not cross­ing until Han­ni­bal, MO.

I stopped for lunch at a Taco Johns. In Can­ton, IL maybe. There were some sad look­ing train bits on a dis­con­nect­ed siding. 

I don’t know whose liv­ery this pur­ple is/was but It must have been an attrac­tive car at one time.

The Caboose seemed to be doing a bit bet­ter. They have so much more charis­ma and so much less sur­face area to paint.

Today I saw the first police I’ve seen in four days. (Not count­ing the Pano­ra offi­cer who waved at me while I parked in the lot at the his­tor­i­cal vil­lage.) The first one was marked and as I came up behind him he pulled into the cen­ter medi­an and U‑turned back the way we’d come. The sec­ond was an unmarked white unit with the inte­ri­or light­bar. I was doing 72 (cruise con­trol) in a 65. Dri­ving right, pass­ing left, etc. He came up on me as I was pass­ing a tanker truck. Pass com­plet­ed, I pulled over, and he pow­ered on past at 80-some­thing. Clear­ly the time had come to get off the road for the evening.