We set off after I got home from work Friday night. The plan (and I say the word plan very lightly..there was not much "planning" involved. More so an end goal in mind. So, we leave our home and head off into the Northwest. Around 2 hours into our drive we decide we are starting to get hungry, but it wasn't urgent yet so we thought "oh, we will drive a little further and stop somewhere once we get hungry" ...mistakes were made!
The minute we crossed the Missouri line into Iowa, our cell phone signal went to roaming and we couldn't call or use any data. In fact, the GPS I had been running on my phone froze and was gone. Now, I can read a paper map, but did we have one handy? Nope.
So..we keep driving in the direction (north) that we knew we needed to go. We planned to stay in Cedar Rapids, IA- because it was a little more than halfway to our end destination (which you will find out in my next entry).
Anyways back to our journey to Iowa. Its dark. Its about...9pm, we haven't had dinner and we don't really know where we are. What makes it even better is Iowa is like Illinois in the sense that you can have 100 miles of interstate with no real exits or civilization. No food. Thank goodness we didn't need gas...
10pm I'm fighting off the "hangry" for Micah's sake. We haven't seen an exit with anything close to the interstate for over an hour now.
10:35pm we finally see a sign for Cedar Rapids! And my GPS roaming signal works partially.
11pm we make it! We can see our Holiday Inn Express in the distance and THEN, I see it. The most magical two arches I've ever seen. MCDONALDS IS STILL OPEN!! We pull up to the drive-thru and someone has just finished ordering so we pull up, order, and I'm so excited by this point. So we pay, and take out spot in line behind one other car. We wait. And...we wait. 5 min go by and three other cars have lined up behind us. FINALLY the car in front of us gets their food and leaves. So we pull up and the girl asks us if we had the two onion burgers and we say no, and Micah repeats our order to the girl.
She just stares at us. "We just gave that order out the window. The lady said it was her order." She then asks us to pull up while they remake our food. While Micah is talking me out of hunting down the black SUV that was in front of us, 6 more cars go through the drive thru and leave. (Apparently this is a popular place at nearly midnight)
5 min later, ( we waited 15 min at this point) we are given the most delicious smelling bag of clog-my-arteries trans fat and we leave. I understand that it takes time to make and re-make an order. They don't keep a full staff all night and I'm mostly just mad at the car in front of us for taking our food..we get to the hotel, I buy a water from the hotel vending machine because mcdonalds forgot to give me my drink, and...the vending machine eats my bottle of water. Luckily the manager was able to shake it out for me. We inhaled our food and went to sleep.
I got up at 8am the next morning and decided I would shower while Micah was still asleep and we could go down to the free breakfast together. I turn on the shower and hop in..holy moly! Its like I was being hit with a full on tropical storm. At one point I thought I saw a tree fly by..ok that MIGHT be a SLIGHT exaggeration..but the water pressure was so high that I had to plant myself in the tub to keep from being knocked over. And I wish I was exaggerating. When I got out of the shower my back was red from being hit with the force of the shower. Really though, I would rather there be too much pressure than a trickle of water.
We go down to breakfast and its amazing! Biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, ham, hot cinnamon rolls, pancakes, and the usual cereal, oatmeal, fruit, yogurt, etc.
After checking out of the Holiday Inn Express we decided we should do something in Cedar Rapids before our next part of our roadtrip. Naturally, I tried to find the most random thing Google could provide, and we decided to check out the Czech and Slovak Museum and Library.
This place was neat! The main exhibit takes you through a history of Czechoslovakia, or now called the Czech Republic. The exhibits are well done and most of them are interactive. Great for children. They even have an entire exhibit dedicated to children where they can have a snack at a traditional Czech kitchen and coloring/art projects.
Micah and I played a game of dominos in a traditional WWII era Czech living room while the radio played 1940's broadcasts, and I put on a puppet show for Micah. They had a little stage and about 10 puppets for you to choose from.
We also went through the exhibit that looked like a steam ship, to see how the Czech immigrants came to America. We also went though the museum's "Beer, Please" exhibit that outlined a history of beer around the world. I found this map interesting, showing the most popular beers bought in each country.
We also took the tour of the Sleger house, a Czech immigrant home. We also watched a 10 minute movie about how they moved the museum after it was flooded in 2008. A very neat place. I would recommend it to anyone passing through Cedar Rapids.
You might be wondering, what else is in Iowa?
Nothing.
Except these windmill turbines.
Seriously though, I'm sure that, like Illinois, Iowa is a great state that has more than one museum. We didn't take a lot of time to really explore all that the state has to offer, but the Czech museum was really neat. I wasn't sure what to expect when we decided to go. We passed exits for Iowa City and Des Moines, which to my knowledge are the two biggest cities in the state. We didn't stop, but I imagine there are fun things to do in each city.
But i will say..as soon as we crossed the Minnesota border, my husbands phone began going off with notifications because we got cell phone signal back. So, I can only conclude that the entire state of Iowa hates T-Mobile service. Or maybe T-Mobile hates Iowa..either way, our phones didn't work at all the entire time we were in the state.
That being said, Iowa, on this particular visit you get:
a +1 for the museum
a +1 for the hotel breakfast
a -1 for the cell phone service
And a -1 for our food being stolen because the vehicle that took it had an Iowa license plate.
So overall, a neutral experience. You have to take the good with the bad when traveling somewhere, right?
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