Traveling east in the predawn hours, we watched one bright planet rise in a kind of orange glow. Venus is incredible. I’ve been watching it come up each morning as I run the last couple of weeks and as we drove out and east on our trip to Mt. Pleasant Iowa, there it was. We are good travelers and can drive seven or eight hundred miles in a day and think nothing of it. We don’t stop much as we pack fried chicken and popcorn along in our cooler of drinks. When we need fuel, we park at the far end to give ourselves a walk into the restrooms easing any stiffness from the ride. 

We arrived just in time to see the night’s concert: Leroy Vandyke and Jimmy Fortune. It was so nice to hear ‘The Auctioneer’ from the man himself! We wandered through the stationary engine row after that for the night-time light show!

Having traveled so far, we didn’t have much time to spend because we had to get home to get cattle moved, but we packed five days worth of farm show into a day and a half. Some of the awesome things I experienced:

hymn sing in the 1890’s era church,  a shoot-out okay-corral style, a cowboy poet explaining the cook’s job on the cattle drive, a school-house built in 1854, ice-cream sundaes, shave ice-and boy did we need it with 95 degree temperatures, a horse treadmill powering a corn sheller, horses powering a well-driller, tons of antique tractors and engines, life lessons from a round pen,

and just about anything you could imagine fitting in to a farm in the 1800 and early 1900’s.

We met some old friends there and we met some new friends. Tremendous is the trip we took.