Memorial Day weekend ride in Iowa

[petenomad]

Ann and I decided to take a little trip to make sure we are in riding shape for a longer vacation in July. We set out Saturday morning from our home in Overland Park and made our way up I-35 to Des Moines. We just made it in time to tour a cool old victorian house called Terrace Hill. This is now the governors mansion. We were able to tour the grounds and the first two floors of the house. Since it was a small group of all adults, the tour guide took down the ropes and let us actually walk into most of the rooms. Very cool.
Our next stop was Council Bluffs Iowa. We decided to take a smaller highway since we didn't have a schedule requirement for this leg of our trip. This was a nice ride across highway 192. As we were headed west, a section of the road was closed and we were detoured North on highway 25 to I-80. As we were riding along we noticed a group of people pulled off on a side road. There was a big sign for a boy scout troop so, I thought it was the entrance to a scout camp. We didn't realize what it was until it was too late to go back, but it was actually, the Freedom Rock.
We followed the detour along I-80 and saw the largest collection of wind turbines we had ever seen called the Adair-Anita wind project. It was an awesome sight.
We spent the night in Council Bluffs and then headed north to the Loess Hills. This is an area of some fairly unique hill formations. It was a gorgeous morning in the 70s with nice curvy roads - mostly 40-45mph sweepers. We had a great time and saw tons of other motorcyclists out enjoying the countryside. Try this link for a more in-depth look at the area.
On the loop back into to town, we stopped at the Lewis and Clark monument and got a good view of Omaha and the Missouri River.
We made one more stop back in Council Bluffs at the Squirrel cage Jail. This is possibly the craziest thing I've ever seen. It was a 3 story tall cylindrical Jail - 28 ft tall and 24 ft in diameter. The whole thing is on a giant turntable and only one cell on each floor can be opened at any time. Apparently, there were nearly 20 at one time, but now this is the only 3 story one left. Most of the others were torn apart and sold for scrap metal. The tour guide said this had 90 tons of steel. They had the records from the 1930s available for review. There were a lot of people jailed for some pretty petty things - intoxication, illegal fishing, and the locale madames were arrested for "promoting disorderly conduct". The cells were clearly designed for 2 but we were told there were 5 or 6 in each.
After a quick lunch, we high-tailed it back to the KC area via I-29. We ran through about 5 miles of fairly heavy rain, but made it home just fine.
We had a nice time on our first longer ride of the year at about 700 miles.