Iowa also has some hills.

(brice writing)

Today we biked ~64 miles from Dubuque to Elkader, IA. As previously mentioned, we’re now following the ACA Northern Tier route and no longer spend our evenings trying to figure out which roads are paved and which are gravel. We climbed out of the Mississippi valley through some of the most picturesque farm scenery we’ve seen since Ohio (sorry IN and IL, you’re too flat). Pictures don’t really do it justice, but here’s one of the views we got:

Hard to see but there were cows hanging out down in that valley. Which brings up the big downside to Iowa so far… while we’ve been eating a lot of meat on this trip and don’t want to complain about where it comes from, it still has to be noted that Iowa is the most pungent state we’ve been in by a long shot.

Some notes: Susan wants you to know that we heard an eagle scream, a sound we were probably able to identify primarily from hearing it on the intro to the Colbert Report. A big congratulations goes out to the Dubuque Perkins, which managed to serve us the only bad breakfast we’ve had on the trip (we’d already climbed out of downtown dubuque where the good restaurants are). Finally, we were super excited to find an open ice cream stand in Colesburg:

Tomorrow we are dropping back to the mississippi and heading north!