Prom night in Dubuque

(brice writing)

After a relaxing night and morning catching up with family friends in a great setting outside Galena, we headed out onto the hilliest terrain we’ve faced since Ohio. While we’re a bit unused to the hills, we’re in much better shape than the last time we saw steep terrain and made good time into Dubuque, IA. The bridge over the Mississippi was a bit dodgy and didn’t afford an opportunity to stop and take a Welcome to Iowa picture but we’re here nonetheless. Dubuque is a really nice little town and is home to the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium. Our initial target for the day had been Dyersville but we were equivocal about that plan so decided to hang out in Dubuque for the afternoon.

The museum is very good and has refreshingly accurate info on the impact of dams/levees on flooding and river ecosystems (for our stream ecology friends, they mentioned caddis flies as a bioindicator species). I’ve always found watersheds to be a powerful tool for thinking about ecosystems and geography at both macro and micro scales; our individual actions in Iowa will slowly trickle downstream and eventually be washed into the gulf of mexico at 3 million gallons per minute. One thing I didn’t know is that by going through North Dakota, we’ll actually briefly cross into a watershed that drains up into the hudson bay. So Canada has something to look forward to.

The restaurant closest to our luxurious Motel 6 was host to some teens out for prom night. In addition to some extremely tasteful dresses featuring pink sequins there was also a white suit; environmental impact reports are forthcoming.

Tomorrow we will meet up with the ACA Northern Tier route and will no longer have to plan our route each day. We’re planning on camping in Elkader, followed by Lansing on Monday, Homer on Tuesday, and just north of Wabasha MN on Wednesday.

Here I am checking out the aforementioned dodgy bridge from the Iowa side:

Here Susan poses in front of a big old paddlewheel:

And here I pilot a virtual tugboat: