Southern Iowa: Enter the Wayback Machine

It's somewhere between the land that time forgot and the land forgotton by time: Southern Iowa. I lit out from Burlington and headed south for Fort Madison, where I picked up the Mormon Pioneer Auto Tour trail going west. The auto tour sort of follows the general path of the trail (hiways 2, 65, 34, 25, and 92), but every 10 miles or so there's a little "Mormon Trail Crossing" sign, and you look, and in most cases you can still see the remnants of the trail--it's just a little worn down and open. Except when there's cornfields on one side or the other, which is often. The little towns along the way are in varying states of being. Donnellson's "Business District" looks a little worse for wear, but Bloomfield, home of French's Hamburger Inn, has a very nice town square centered around the court house. Oh, and French's--mais oui! The house specialty is the Loose Meat Burger, which entails a big cooker full of tender ground beef, and a seated woman--not unlike a surgeon or a diamond-splitter--meticulousy putting them together, wrapping them in paper, then handing them to you (lest you spill). The lemonade was homemade, and the corn poppers were poppy! Corn popper: 8 or so fresh sweet corn kernals held together by a little batter then deep fried. Wowza, some kind of tasty--AND, yet another thing to do with corn! The auto tour road continued, past a never-ending array of beautiful old barns, and after a few wrong turns onto some amazingly empty county roads, I turned west again to avoid the "end of pavement" issue and stared straight down the barrel of an Iowa thunderstorm. On with the raingear, and a pucker of the bum (lots of lightning, and me riding the only hunk of metal for miles), and it was a race to shelter. 5 minutes before the sky fell I took over a town picnic shelter in Weldon. The lightning was everywhere for about 30 minutes, then---bright sun. Onwards then through Osceloa and Greenfield, through Council Bluffs, then across the Missouri River in to Omaha. Tuesday it's off to follow the Platt River west on Hiway 30, the Lincon Hiway ("America's First Coast to Coast Hiway").