stormy weather

Our little Mazda Protege5 has been perfect for trips like this. It's big enough to bring our camping gear, and just big enough for us to sleep in comfortably should we drive too late to set up the tent. After the "Trucker's Jamboree" outside Davenport, we drove another 60 miles before pulling off the highway to sleep. Some pretty severe thunderstorms woke us up the next morning, and kept coming at us as we continued to make our way toward Nebraska.

Truck stop love

The world's largest truckstop, Iowa 80, has parking for 800 trucks. This means there's room for fairs of the kind we happened upon, meaning we could check off another item on our Great Plains scavenger hunt. While local fairs are held everywhere across the country, I think their importance, and therefore dynamism, is magnified in the less populated areas like the plains, where there tend to be fewer large scale social events during the year.

Scavenger hunt, item four:

Fair: 1. an exhibition, usually competitive, of farm products, livestock, etc., often combined in the U.S. with entertainment and heldannually by a county or state.

2. a periodic gathering of buyers and sellers in an appointed place.

3. an exposition in which different exhibitors participate, sometimes with the purpose of buying or selling

Fans

Aaron Tippin fans

Aaron Tippin fans

We turned into Iowa 80 truck stop for a bite to eat and instead got to see a "Trucker's Jamboree". This meant, for us, a couple hours of wandering through a fair complete with hundreds of tractor-trailers, food tents, balloons, fireworks, games, and midwesterners of all sizes. A growing crowd in one corner of the fair drew us in, where we found out the country music star Aaron Tippin was signing autographs. We'd arrived in a new land.

Westward into Iowa

Interstate 80, northern Illinois

Continuing westbound on Interstate 80 through northern Illinois, we crossed over the Mississippi River into Iowa at dusk. We counted on driving well into the night in order to make Nebraska fairly early the next day. The "World's Largest Truck Stop" drew us off the highway for a quick bite to eat, but there was a Truckers Jamboree going on, giving us a chance to see a large number of Iowans and find out whether they live up to their giant corn-fed stereotypes...