Call of the wild

If you haven't figured it out, there are some timing issues going on with the posts.  I am catching up on previous events while rolling down the road.  The following happened September second and third 2016:

We rattled on, a little off course, through Illinois on into Clinton, IA to have a missed connection with a high school friend.




I knew we weren't going to make it to Kansas today, late start as usual, but I thought maybe Des Moines.  The sun was plummeting and the World's largest truck stop was on the horizon, There was no way we were making it to Des Moines.

Find Frog - Trucker Style

After a quick magnet and bumper sticker pick up at I80 Iowa, we flitted like a moth into the Amana, Iowa.  Not quite to Des Moines, but close to where my father's parents and my ancestors are buried, we crashed.  We found an RV park among the Amana Colonies and called it a night: Nothing unusual, a call ahead, an envelope to pick up, and a slot to sleep in.

<vuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu>OOOOOOWWWWWW, HOW, HOW, HOWWWWWWWl!<ummmmmmmm>HOW HOW HOWLLLLLLLL!<mmmmmmmmmmm>. 

"Are those coyotes?

"Who the hell is vacuuming their RV at 8 am right next door?"

"Are coyotes even native to the area?"

I am irritated,  Nicole is looking out the blinds, and one mystery is quickly solved.  

Not vacuuming, but blow drying their dog.  What?  I have a new mystery on my hands.  I throw on the coffee and stumble out of Norma like a new dawn being birthed; stumbling, births and new days happen all the time but every one is different.  Only one new camper sitting next to us from the previous night, and it is the women drying her dog off on the table while smoking a cigarette in her pjs.  I walk down the loose gravel path toward the sound of coyotes.  I found another RV out on the edge of the park by itself with a fence caging a dozen huskies.  I look down the slope and there are dogs, hundreds of dogs.  We woke up to a regional dog show put on by the Cedars Rapid Kennel Club.  I have to watch "Best in Show" again soon, real soon.

As I said, so close I have to visit the relatives in Pilot Grove Cemetery that traces me back to Germany on my father's side. Well over 30 headstones say Lortz here.  I haven't met 30 Lortz's in my life.

That and my parents stone from Billings, MT makes this a bit retrospective and yeah you can take 1985 and '86 back and
while we are at it 2001.

Mom and Dad

We bypassed the western side of Iowa and cut down south from Des Moines and sombered onto the Day of Gluttony… I'm not ready to visit the headstones on my mother's side in the other half of Iowa.