Road Trip!
Dave & I have decided to try to take a weekend every month or two and take a short roadtrip - just to get away. We’ve really only had 2 or 3 true “vacations” in 30 years, and now that we have people in the office to ‘hold down the fort’ while we’re away, we’re hoping to have a few weekends off. We’re also starting to plan a road trip vacation once a year, to various parts of the country. We’ll plan on stopping to see relatives in the area when we can - and first up will be California, of course! 
In the meantime, we took our first weekend off, and headed to …. Iowa! Dave heard of a casino/hotel there and thought it might be nice. I checked my resources to find yarn shops along the way …. win-win! We stopped in Owatonna at a small yarn shop that was in a converted porch area of a home. For the size of the place, I was amazed at the amount of yarn she had. After a quick purchase, it was back on the highway again. (The other yarn shop on the list, in Ames, was apparently out of business. 
) It was an easy drive to get there (although rather boring). In addition to Iowa cornfields, there are now Iowa wind farms!
We were surprised at how many we saw. They are enormous machines, and didn’t appear to be moving very fast - making me wonder how much energy they produce (or how much distance changes your perspective).
After a few hours in the car, we arrived in the middle of nowhere at our hotel/casino:
Nice enough accommodations, and a pretty good deal on the room. Other than being a captive audience (anything worth going to was at least an hour in any direction), it was a nice stay. I got a lot done on my knitting (in the car and in the hotel), and I played a slot machine every time I went to dinner. I ended up being up $30!
Dave played in a poker room there and discovered if you played for (whatever amount of time it was - I don’t remember), then they gave you your room for something like $40 instead of the $95 it was supposed to be. There was a bit of confusion at checkout and our deal (which I thought was both Friday and Saturday nights) was apparently only for Friday, but then Dave’s deal from playing poker kicked in for Saturday. All in all, a nice weekend away and very little expense!
We stopped on the way back home to check out the windmill farms. We had heard that they are SO noisy! Many of the wind farms we’d passed were still on Sunday…. I started to wonder if perhaps Iowa had outlawed operating windmills on Sunday so people would get at least one day of rest per week…? As we neared the border, we saw some of the windmills were moving (so much for my theory….!) so we pulled off the road to get some photos and to “listen” to all the noise.
What did we discover? NO NOISE! It was peaceful and quiet - even right next to the power collection. Then we saw this wonderful juxtaposition:
One last stop before we headed home - Dave wanted to check out another casino he had seen, Diamond Jo’s. To me, casinos are pretty much all the same (except for the buffets!) but this one truly was “Iowa”:
