A couple of trips back, I found this very comfortable coffee shop called the High Ground Cafe in Iowa City. Reasonable prices (in the greater scheme of things), free wifi (de rigueur these days), nice open, modern space, with a fireplace going in the winter (a real draw now, with the temperature at 24 degrees and the wind blowing at about 20 mph). I’m sitting by the door, so I can see everyone that comes in, right before I get a refreshing cold blast from the outside. Still crowded and energetic at 5 pm. A nice place to sit and write.
I managed to arrive in Iowa just as the first real cold snap hit, and after all of the trees lost their leaves. There’s a kind of beauty in the starkness of bare branches, although it doesn’t photograph quite as well as the golds, reds, yellows, and oranges of high autumn.
The drive today over from Des Moines was uneventful. A stop in Newton at a Culvers for a quick lunch (a pork tenderloin sandwich, sorry Suzie, couldn’t resist; you can’t find such a thing in California), shared (the lunch space, not the sandwich) with a group of young trainees from the Iowa Highway Patrol, a grandma and her two grandkids, two older, rotund men who looked to be spending the afternoon there, and assorted travelers like me, pulled off of I-80 by signs promising more than one choice (even four or five!) of restaurant, gas station, and convenience store. Then off again under a uniform gray sky. A trip broken only by the funny sight of extra-long tractor-trailers carrying enormously long, sublimely tapered blades for new wind turbines under construction, trucks looking as if they are transporting huge tusks from some long-extinct mammoth species. Further along, the result: immense fields of completed wind turbines, hundreds seemingly scattered (but no doubt placed with extreme care) among the flat corn and soybean fields. The particular project I passed, research shows, is called the North English project, and will ultimately generate 200 MW of renewable wind power, adding to the large number of wind farms (28!) that Mid American Energy has constructed in Iowa. Well-placed, I would say; they were spinning like hell today.
After I checked myself into the Airbnb house I’m staying in on Court Street in eastern Iowa City (clean, solid, and functional, but with no TV, hence the completion of this short post), I drove off in search of warmer gloves, first stopping by the Iowa Memorial Union to take a few pictures along the Iowa River. I had little hope for any good results; through the viewfinder the pictures looked ‘meh,’ but in fact one of them turned out to be nice, a weak late-fall sun illuminating and coloring an otherwise gray sky, with my old dorm (Hillcrest, I couldn’t leave you soon enough) on the far bank, the old CRANDIC (Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railway) bridge, and the river itself, unnaturally high (I think) for this time of year. The picture is a good way to end this post, it explains why I love coming back here, even in the middle of November.
Categories: Travel -- General