The Graffiti of the Bridges of Madison County

Two common themes of this blog are graffiti and bridges. The two merge seamlessly while we visited the Bridges of Madison County. I visited the Bridges previously during a family vacation in the 1990's and I remember being surprised to find "Where's Clint?" spray painted on the inside of one of the bridges. I don't quite understand it myself but many people treat the bridges as we did in Kharkiv and use it as a way to express your unending love for someone...or Justin Bieber...

...or the movie "Bridges of Madison County"...

...or maybe some free form poetry...

...or maybe you've come a long way to Iowa and you want to express itself...

...you can't go wrong expressing your love for the troops...

...or you can always draw a graffiti classic but not quite the right way.

Winterset, Iowa Pt. 2

If you slightly adjust the angle of the first photo of the Winterset water tower in Pt. 1 of my Winterset, Iowa post you will notice the street sign reads John Wayne Drive. And rightfully so the main road through Winterset is named after its favorite son. 

Winterset is currently constructing a new John Wayne Museum which will take up two city blocks and will completed in early summer 2015. John Wayne's birthplace itself is a very unimposing single-story house which has a nice little gift shop attached to it.

And parked down the street is this great van. 

Taking a look at the side of the van you'll find a great paint job featuring John's famous role as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Here's the famous scene with Robert Duvall.

After getting our fill of The Duke we moved onto Winterset's other main attraction, the Bridges of Madison County. There are six bridges remaining and we ended up visiting three of them. The Cedar Bridge is the only bridge that you can drive through and so we made a little video of us driving through.



My comment in the video about burning down the bridge was in reference to the Cedar Bridge actually being burned down in 2002 by arson. The bridge that you drive through today was rebuilt using period materials and techniques in 2004. 

Winterset, Iowa Pt. 1

Yes, you read that title correctly. I need more than one post to cover visiting a city of a little more than 5,000 people in the middle of Iowa. You see, as far as small towns go Winterset, Iowa hit the jackpot of tourist attractions. Not only do they boast John Wayne's birthplace [and upcoming John Wayne Museum] this Madison County town also has many of the famous Bridges of Madison County surrounding it. I'll be highlighting those two attractions in a future post, today we have a couple of interesting alternative Winterset sites.

In the center of town there is the lovely Madison County Courthouse built in 1876. 

Directly across the street from the courthouse is this great movie theater called the Iowa Theater. It recently had a campaign to upgrade their projection to digital projection and they often have interesting movie themes like John Wayne/Maureen O'Hara films. 

Over at the Chamber of Commerce office/gift shop they have a TV showing "The Bridges of Madison County" during business hours.

I also found in there gift shop a pile of these great Winterset Dairy caps. I especially love the old phone number "529."

Iowa Cornfields and Windmills

Iowa Cornfields and Windmills

Recorded: September 20th, 2013

Here is a little video I made on our drive from Lawrence to Minneapolis back in September.  Much of this was recorded between Des Monies, IA and Albert Lea, MN.

My Dad's Lucky Slot Machine

Our short term plan is to return to Kansas for the school year and so a few weeks ago my Dad and I took a load of stuff down to our storage space in Lawrence. While we were driving back we took a break at a way station in Iowa and as I was buying some vending machine snacks I noticed that the change machine accepted large denomination bills and gave out $1 coins.  

My Dad is a numismatist, a.k.a a coin collector, and so this was a treasure trove as it is hard to find stores that give out the coins in their change.  He keeps every state quarter he comes upon and so this was a chance to get many of the presidential dollar coins all at once.  So it then became a slot machine that you really couldn't loose at.  $5 went in and $5 came out, repeat.  As you can see from the second photo, I think it made his day.