Hawkeye Point, 76 Trombones, The Black Angel, James T. Kirk, Amish Buggies, and... The High Barbaree... All in One Day!

The day ended with Triple Berry pie.  But I get ahead of myself.  We rolled at 8 AM after sub-optimal hotel biscuits and coffee.  Ahead was a 546 mile day that will not be forgotten.  No way.  Too much of road trip goodness in one day.  An hour of easy terrain among Iowa cornfields and farms brought us to Sibley and Hawkeye Point, 1,670 Feet. Well, Google did take us through some dirt roads and farmlands, and past an old cemetery (Google somehow knows our love for cemeteries and accommodates).  But we arrived just a few minutes later than expected.  After 13 months of no high points the old familiar exhilaration came without a nudge.  The Point lies behind a farm just off the main highway... 3.5 miles south of the Minnesota state line.  There are so many nice touches at this highpoint that I rank it above many others of greater elevation.

At Hawkeye Point, there is:

1. Great signage leading to the place;
2. A campground;
3. An observation deck;
4. A picture with holes for your faces;
5. A mosaic of Iowa;
6. A large stone marker;
7. A registration box;
8. A set of five signposts with 10 signs each pointing to all the other state highpoints and their distances (fantastic).
9. A bulletin board with license plates from all 50 states.

     Since Alex had never been to Minnesota, we headed after photos and hopped on I-90 headed East to Albert Lea, Minnesota, where again we would head south into Iowa.  Ahead and next on our agenda was the Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery, Iowa City, a place of vaunted haunted lore.  But first, our appetites bid us to repast at Mason City, along the route.  New fun fact: Mason City was the inspiration for River City of Music Man fame.  Truly, it exuded midwest charm.  Sigh.  In another life. Rear view mirror.

     But now the Black Angel...

     From www.prairieghosts.com: "The black angel of Oakland Cemetery is an eight and a half foot tall burial monument for the Feldevert family, erected in the cemetery in 1912. Since that time, it has been the source of many stories and legends in Iowa City --- most connected to the mysterious change in color that the angel took, turning from a golden bronze to an eerie black..."

     Alex had read about it, and we needed to see it, and it was on the way to a roadside shrine of an entirely different nature.

     So we saw it.  Took photos of it.  And we were not afraid.  It sure it interesting how people get superstitious about the silliest things.  It was a very cool cemetery though.

     Having buried our ghosts we went on to Riverside, Iowa, a place of great importance in the year 2248... the birthplace of... James Tiberius Kirk.

We had to do it.  When he is finally born we can say we visited his future birthplace.

Oh, and live long and prosper!

     Now, if this had been all there was to that day, it would have be a really great day.  But this day wasn't over yet.  Not by a longshot.  My plan was to head west toward Omaha, back on I-80, and make a brief detour to Colfax, Iowa, the boyhood home of one of my favorite authors, James Norman Hall.  But, GPS on our phones was NOT working.  We were in a valley and a ways from the interstate.  Not wanting to backtrack, I reckoned that we would be fine if we headed west out of Riverside toward Kalona, Iowa, then we could steer north again to the main artery.  Through rolling hills we drove and listened and sang, musing on the cursed Black Angel and Star Trek.  Until...

     "Amish people!" I exclaimed, laughing out loud.  "Yesssss!" For truly we had been rewarded.  I had no clue, but seeing the quirky, anachronistic folk was a high point on a high point day.  The girls laughed at me as I made Amish jokes and talked endlessly of the awesomeness of seeing Amish people unexpectedly.  It's like going bird-watching and seeing an Ivory Billed Woodpecker.  Well I was immensely entertained at seeing this primitive tribe in their natural habitat, especially when I had no idea whatsoever they were there.  I had sermon illustrations wildly whirling in my mind when at last we reluctantly merged onto the main highway.  And this day still wasn't done.

     Last on the list was Colfax.  A postage stamp town not far east of Des Moines, and just a few miles south of the freeway, James Norman Hall grew up here, the author of Mutiny on the Bounty and a good number of other great books.  When I was in seminary I ran across his High Barbaree, and I was absolutely enchanted for an afternoon as I read his short novel about the survivors of war in the South Pacific.  There were scenes in the novel that he drew from his childhood days in turn-of-the-century Colfax that really tugged on my nostalgia strings regarding my father's boyhood home on a farm in southern Oklahoma.  I have an unbounded love for that time in our nation's history, especially turn of the century midwest.  It is my personal utopia.  So I just wanted to see the town, the standpipe, and the G-Note Road, running west toward Prairie City, a road of dreams and idealism and maybe of heaven on earth.  I wasn't disappointed.  It was a picture of the past and as close to how I imagined it as possible.  We gave Alex her name from the protagonist of High Barbaree, Alec Brooke.

     I have to admit I wanted to linger, and live another life here.  But it would not be mine.  Not in this life at least..  Back to life... back to reality... back through Des Moines to Clive.

     How to top off a truly capital day?  Why with triple berry pie!  The day ended with triple berry pie...