America Celebrates, and Mourns

Graphic courtesy http://www.funmunch.com/

Our route from Duluth to here in Iowa

Picturesque city of Galena, Illinois

Lazy Acres RV Park in Iowa nestling in the corn fields

Same park 3 hrs later - beautiful sunsets

Today is the 4th of July here in the USA. Americans all around the world are celebrating their independence from Britain that occured back on the 4th July 1776. It is also their National Day like our Australia Day - families organise BBQ's, picnics or attending a baseball game. Fireworks are a common way for a town or city to celebrate. Often as we are driving along highway routes, we are amazed at the size of stores selling fireworks. Considering many states have banned personal fireworks (apart from sparklers etc), they seem to have a huge buying public. This time of the year is like Valentine's Day to a florist shop - sales, sales, sales. We experienced a 4th July celebration in DC while we were living there in 2003, and it was a huge event. The parade was fabulous and the fireworks seemed to go on forever. I bet this year was just as good.

As well as celebrating independence, many Americans have been mourning while celebrating the contributions made to the nation and to the world by Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, each one losing their life recently. May they Rest in Peace.

As I mentioned in the last blog, we called into Milwaukee for the Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson concert. I'm not a Bob Dylan fan, so I preferred to stay in the RV while Murray went to the show. We planned to park at a Park & Ride, but their parking lots were isolated and if I screamed for help I daresay no-one would hear me, so we went to a nearby shopping mall and parked in their car park. Fortunately the supermarket was open 24/7 and the lighting was great, so I felt quite safe. Murray was impressed with the Park & Ride bus service. The buses ran between the parking lot and the concert amphitheatre evey 15 mins as the concert coincided with the city's summerfest. When the concert finished and Murray arrived back at the RV, we had a 30 minute drive to our campground.

The next day we drove out of the state of Wisconsin, into Illinois and passed through the quaint city of Galena, home of Ulysses S. Grant. We ended up in Iowa where we

stayed at a campground amongst the corn fields. It seems that everywhere you drive in this state you see lovely, healthy corn fields at this time of the year. After all, it is summer. Did you know that Iowa has produced the largest corn crop of any US state for each of the past 14 years? It grows three times as much corn as a country like Argentina. We had sweet corn on the cob for lunch, but apparently only a very small portion of Iowa's corn is sweet corn for eating. Most is used for animal feed, and is also processed for oil and ethanol. We passed a huge corn processing plant a few miles back. Most of the corn plants in Iowa have been bred to produce just one ear of corn each, rather than a few smaller ones. Harvest is done is September or October, depending on how hot the summer gets. If it is a cool summer, the corn grows more slowly and harvesting won't occur until November. So there you have it - probably more than you wanted to know about Iowa corn!

The owner of this campground has been very welcoming to us as he spent 2.5 memorable years downunder helping Aussie station owners get blue ribbons for their cattle at shows. When we arrived he offered us the use of a car if we wanted to go and see the local sights, and we thanked him for his gesture, but didn't take him up on it. A few hours later he actually came and knocked on the door of our RV and said his wife's car rarely got used and could do with a run, so repeated that it was there to be used. We have found the Americans we have met along our travels to be generous, warm hearted folks who would give us the shirt of their back if we needed it.