Rocking Out to Hawkeye

     It has been a year and then some since the last foray to a state high point.  It has been an action-packed year.  Our son Turner, who began the high point adventures with me, has gone off to college at Moody Bible Institute.  Our daughter has set her sights high for college and has extraordinary accomplishments for her age.  I have been to war-torn Ukraine and back; we have hiked in Zion National Park and strolled the shore at Pacific Grove, California.  We have been back and forth to Spokane individually and as a family, to California, Oregon, Virginia, and Texas.  But not one of us has visited a single state high point.  Last summer's bounty was rich: Kansas, Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana, all in one swoop.  Thanks to the demands of a family going in many directions, and a busy summer for all of us, it came to three days and one high point, a foray to Hawkeye Point, Iowa.  We invited the daughter of our dear friends, Lorelei Thorne as a guest high-pointer, and she brought much to the team: humor, low-maintenance traveller, and best of all, DJ and singer extraordinaire.  We would have great tunes and singing on this road trip.

     We left after church on Sunday, August 9th, and headed northeast on Interstate 76, to intersect with I-80, toward Omaha, and ultimately, Le Mars, Iowa.  The trip was easy, unhurried, relished.  We listened to great rock bands of the 70s and 80s - Styx, Journey, Foreigner, Van Halen. At a gas station after dark, we are reminded that we have entered the midwest by the billions of bugs swarming every light.  Later, after we had crossed into Iowa and headed along the Missouri River on I-29, Michael Jackson's greatest hits throbbed in our speakers, with eerie spotlights tickling the low clouds in the pitch darkness over the river, and constant lightning to the north and east.  Somewhere they were getting pounded with rain.  We laughed, we sang, we shared rude customer stories over sushi, and before we knew it, it was midnight and we were dragging our luggage into the Le Mars version of a traveler's rest.

We were poised to see state high point #25, Hawkeye Point, Iowa.