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."

Pysanky Egg Making At KU

Roughly a year ago Laura and I got to visit the Pysanky Museum in Kolomyia, Ukraine and it was my second favorite museum from our travels in Ukraine behind the Cosmonaut Museum. And so yesterday Laura and I had the opportunity to learn how to make pysanky at KU.  

The first step was to draw on your design onto the egg. We were told that when designing the egg it's best to use raw eggs and then after it is complete you can remove the yolk. When drawing on your design try to do it as lightly as possible.

We picked the design in the right corner for our egg. It's a pretty basic with lots of straight lines. 

Our egg with the design added.

Then using a tool called a kitska you put melted beeswax on the areas you would like to keep white. 

If you know Laura then you can guess which color we dyed the egg. 

As you can see the beeswax stops the dye from reaching the egg shell. 

Here is the dried egg after dying. If you are going to use multiple colors it's important to go from light to dark on the color spectrum. 

When you are done dying you can melt the beeswax off the white areas.

Here are some of the completed eggs done by our pysanky guru Megan. Maybe with a little practice we can someday make eggs as half as good as this. If you are interested in doing some pysanky yourself you can find all the tools you'll need HERE.

Panoramic View Of Kansas City

While visiting the World War I Memorial in Kansas City we found a great overlook point that lets you get a nice view of downtown KC. Here's a panoramic I took on that gloomy winter's day.

And you can find a larger version HERE.

A Solyanka Soup Diary

Although I enjoyed many a Greek salad in Greece, fish and chips in England, and wonderful cheeses in France, there was no better cultural food I enjoyed more than the Solyanka soups I had during my time in Eastern Europe. Solyanka is a spicy and sour soup that can transform its self with nearly anything you have around your kitchen. It is most often make with left over meat but you can also have it with mushrooms or fish.  

It is nearly always served with black olives but the best bowl I ever ate had a green olive in it. Lemon slices and a dollop of sour cream are also mandatory.  It seems to me the cheaper the meat the better and I could never imagine a steak quality meat in it dish. Some of the best I've had seemed to be bologna or mystery meat. Which leads to another point, there has to be a nice sheen of oil on top of from all the blending ingredients. My favorite also had edible lemon slices [peels cut off] and some just added the slices for a burst of sour. As I said, there are a million varieties which is part of the fun.  

Here are photos of nearly every Solyanka dish I had while in Ukraine and Latvia and they demonstrate the variety of the soup . I'm sure I missed a soup here and here but I don't think I missed too many. 

Enjoyed March 4th, 2013

Enjoyed April 4th, 2013

Enjoyed March 8th, 2013

Enjoyed March 10th, 2013

Enjoyed March 28th, 2013

Enjoyed April 1st, 2013

Enjoyed May 9th, 2013

Enjoyed February 11th, 2013

Enjoyed February 15th, 2013

Enjoyed March 6th, 2013

Enjoyed March 14th, 2013

Enjoyed March 26th, 2013

Every other Solyanka soup I had was from a restaurant or cafe except this last one. This particular soup came to our kitchen from our friends in the Kharkiv Rotary Club and was the only true "home made" dish that we had.

And here they are all together:

The Love More Garage

One of my first posts on this blog was about Lawrence's Love Garage and it was sad to find that while we abroad in Ukraine the famous garage door was painted over and replaced with a slightly less universal message. But while walking to campus the other day I was happy to see that the garage was red again with a similar yet slightly different message.

2014 May Be My Lucky Year

I wasn't able to head back to Wisconsin for the Christmas holiday this year but a week later my parents came to Kansas for a visit. We celebrated the holiday with traditional English feast of a Christmas goose and for desert some Christmas pudding. A tradition we always follow is to bake an English six pence into the pudding and whoever finds the coin while chowing down on their piece of the pudding is sure to have a lucky year.  

I found the coin this year and I took a little a little bit out of it before realizing what I had.  

This year's Christmas pudding was the first that my mother had made on her own after my Grandmother [who was from England and brought our family this tradition] passed away .