May 14th-21st, 2022
We had a long stay in the Denver area, but it was time to head east. Monica's mom (Jean) moved from Las Vegas to Muscatine, Iowa -- she stopped by with her friend Janet when they passed by Elephant Butte and it was time to check out her new house. Jean grew up in Muscatine, and Monica's grandma lived there when Monica was young. It promised to be a nice reminder of being young and visiting grandma.
We drove to York, Nebraska first for an overnight stay. Along the way, our map systems told us about a 20-minute slow down due to construction traffic. Being the smart women we are, we formed a detour using farm roads that looked promising. Of course, the best-laid plans aren't always the best. It had rained, and everything was coated in mud. It was a fun way to find out the hole in the slide floor was big enough to fling mud from the tires up to the inside of the windshield (that's since been fixed). Lesson learned! When you have a motor home, car, and boat, stay on the main roads.
Mom's new house was awesome! She "coincidentally" bought a house with a pad on the side for an RV complete with full hookups. We fit nicely and had a second garage for the car and boat. Of course, it turned out the electrical hookup didn't work and the water wouldn't turn on, but we managed to get an electrician to hook us up. We just ran our water hose from the house, instead.
We spent our first days helping mom unpack and get a bit more settled. We also got to hang out with mom's friend, Dave. We took one of the days to go visit the Mississippi River and the US Lock and Dam 16. Muscatine is right on the river, and we tried to get there every chance we could. We were lucky to visit the lock when a barge was going through it, and it was a very cool thing to see.
Though we had the boat with us, and we intended on getting out on the river, we thought a fun introduction to the water would be on a river boat. We got tickets for a dinner cruise on the Celebration Belle, and it was really cool. Dinner wasn't very good, but the scenery more than made up for it. We really liked passing under the bridge, especially at night. It was a great tour.
We also did a bike ride through Muscatine and along a great bike path they have along the river. We rode all the way to the big park on the other side of town and back. Monica used to play in that park when she visited her grandma, so it brought back some pretty awesome memories.
One of the most special things we did in Muscatine was to go to the Muscatine Art Center. It's in an old home, with a couple floors of rooms decorated the way they would have been in the 1800s. That would have been enough to make it a very cool stop, but the best part (for us) were the art collections. They had artwork from local artists, artwork with the Mississippi River as the subject, and the Mary Musser-Gilmore Collection, where we were able to get close to works by Renoir, Degas, Picasso, and others. Right there in Muscatine! We spend a while in the art center, and it will always be a stop for us when we're in town.
We would spend three weeks in Muscatine at mom's and a Corps of Engineers site nearby, and it was wonderful. The grass and trees and every bit of the area was so green and lush -- definitely not what we're used to in the southwest. Stay tuned for more of our Midwest adventures. We loved it!
