Jul 11, 2010 - Day One A Complete Success

From Karen: 550 miles under our belt. No accidents. No arguments. Many blessings. We're just west of Des Moines, Iowa and happily settled in for the night after 11 hours on the road. Frankly we're dead tired, but attempting to save face with our camping neighbors here at this swanky KOA by staying awake until the sun goes down. If you're only looking for exciting highlights, you can stop reading here! Our 6 a.m. departure was merely a pipe dream. With Kiera and I up until 1:15 a.m. packing, and Ric returning from his gig in Detroit at 2:15,...

Sep 27, 2008 - Adel, Iowa

Saturday, September 27, 2008 At this site we reached one of our goals for our adventure! After seeing the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site and Presidential Museum we had seen a house, library, museum, and/or monument for every US President. We had also gone to Cedar Falls, a closed Ice House Museum, Cedar River, Grant Wood Studio and Visitor Center, Iowa Masons Library, and the Field of Dreams Main Movie Site. As we were getting ready to leave the owner came over to say good-bye. Then we saw him take some of the children staying at the...

May 16, 2008 - Brighton, Michigan to Adel, Iowa

Hey Hey! we are finally off. We left at 8:30 AM from Brighton, Mi and travelled through Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa: stopping in Adel, Iowa outside the city of Des Moines at the Des Moines West KOA park. The park is very nice and clean. A pretty sunset a bonus. Our total mileage today was 605 miles. We will post pictures as we move along. We are just learning to use this journal site and hope to get better at it. We will all be making entries so that our families and friends will know that we are thinking of them. I have learned today...

Jun 4, 2007 - Travel to Adel, IA

Miles driven today: 335 Total Miles Driven 2,333 This morning we left Joliet, Illinois and headed west to Iowa. We spent the day in Winterset (west of Des Moines)' the birthplace of John Wayne. It's also in Madison County, home of the covered bridges from book and movie fame---"The Bridges of Madison County. We had fun trying to locate all six of the existing bridges and especially the famous one featured in the movie that starred Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. We had a burger at the Northside Café, which also was a memorable scene in the...

Jun 4, 2007 - Howdy Pilgrim....Welcome to Madison County

Up early this morning, we have almost three hundered miles to go before we stop for the night in Adel. We are traveling along I-80 through Illinois and Iowa and the farm land on both sides of the highway are green and rolling. What big farms we have seen and the barns are even bigger but I guess with the kinds of winters they see here they need a big barn to store all their equiptment and house their animals. We arrived in Adel, Iowa around 3:30 and how surprised we were to find out that Adel is in Madison (The Bridges of Madison County)...

Jun 2, 2007 - Still moving on

Another long day...we left at 5:30 this morning and drove across Nebraska and into Iowa. We drove 550 miles. We made really good time, but we forgot that we'd be crossing another time zone today...we went from Mountain time to Central time...so, we lost an hour and stopped at 4:00 pm in Adel, Iowa for the evening. There's another nice KOA here...gravel, level, quiet and lovely. Plenty of room for Kitt to run...it's been great for her. Tomorrow we expect to make it to within 200 miles of home.