Lil and I left home on Sunday, June 8th, for Iowa City, Iowa where Lil was enrolled for a week long session of the annual Iowa Writer's Festival. This all happens on the campus of the University of Iowa. The trip was very pleasant and turned out to be shorter that I had estimated - it only took us about six hours to travel the approximate 350 miles.
We stayed at the Iowa House which is at the student Union Building. The rooms there are a bit dated but they are adequate and reasonably priced - and this put us right in the center of all the activities. Iowa City is a nice quaint place and is situated right on the Iowa River. It is somewhat smaller than Lafayette and West Lafayette - probably about 55,000 in population. The campus is spread out and is actually on both sides of the river. Also, across the river to the west is the small town of Coralville which has, among other things, a wonderful and huge shopping mall.
The writing workshop has more than two dozen or so specialized sections and each participant has to choose one when making their reservation. Lil picked one entitled "Novel Solutions" which was chaired by Wayne Johnson who is a long time staffer of the Iowa Writer's Festival. Wayne is an editor by way of training and really has an affinity for looking at a writing sample and instantly spotting shortcomings. Lil found him to be very helpful and came home with lots of ideas for fine tuning the novel she has been working on for some time. There were about twelve other people in her class and they all seem to have bonded during the week and found each other's comments and criticisms to be extremely helpful and gratifying. I'm sure they will all be trading emails for some time to come.
During the times when Lil was off to classes, I was left to amuse myself. The first day I spent driving around Iowa City and Coralville in an effort to kind of get the "lay of the land" as it were. That is when I discovered the big shopping mall. On Tuesday, I drove about 90 miles to the northwest to visit the parents and family of our son, Ted's, girl friend, Caroline. They live in a rural area not far from Marshalltown. I was their guest for lunch and then we had a very pleasant and enlightening two and a half hour visit.
One evening, while walking around in the downtown area, we had come across a little park and had seen some real nice looking playground equipment which featured a sign indicating that part of the funding for this project had been provided by the Iowa City Optimist Club. That gave me the idea to look into a possible club visit as I belong to the Optimist chapter here in Lafayette.
Part of Lil's orientation kit included some information about how to use a temporary guest ID and password which would enable one to utilize the campus computer network and use their software. So I did some snooping and learned that the Lindquist Computing Center was full of PC's just waiting to be tapped! From there, I logged on and, using Google, found that the Iowa City Optimists have a web page and there I learned that they meet every Wednesday at noon at the Masonic Building. So, Wednesday at noon, I paid them a visit and, of course, they invited me to have lunch with them. They were a pleasant group of guys and gals and, since I had made it a point to wear my "Purdue" logo shirt, I took a lot of good natured (well - MOST of it was good natured!) ribbing from all the partisan Iowa Hawkeye supporters. (For the uninitiated, Purdue and Iowa are old long standing rivals in the Big Ten athletic conference.)
On another day, I went to one of the area's several golf courses and hit a bucket of balls at their driving range. (Trust me on this one - Tiger Woods has nothing to fear from me!). Then, one evening, Lil and I went to a movie theater at the Coralville Mall and saw "Identity." That turned out to be one of those movies that I'm going to have to see a second time before I pass final judgement. There is a tremendous surprise (plot twist) near the end which completely changes everything you thought you had seen up to that point. I won't say any more for now - but, I'm sure this movie would not be for everyone. I guess I would say that if you didn't like or understand "Being John Malkovich," you probably wouldn't like this one.
That's about it - I guess I really don't consider this to be a travelogue in the usual sense. While everything I saw was new to me, because of Lil going to her classes every day, it just didn't have the feel of a vacation trip as such. And one big regret is that there simply wasn't time enough to go to western Iowa where we had an invitation to meet and visit with Brenda Lewis. As I told you privately, Brenda, maybe some other time - never say never!
Going home, we decided to go another route. Whereas we had driven up through the farm country of central Illinois, this time we drove east on Interstate 80 to Chicago. There, we went to the suburb of Lisle (which locals pronounce, "Lyle" - go figure!), and spent a few hours visiting with our youngest son, Charlie, who just moved there recently from Columbus, Ohio. Charlie took us to a charming little place in neighboring Naperville for lunch and I am always amazed to find such lovely places that really aren't all that far from the Chicago Loop (which is an area I don't find to be very lovely at all!).
We got back home late on Saturday evening - and it is always nice to get
back in your old home bed - I slept like a log Saturday night. Then it
was back to the old grind. That three acres of grass sure grew a lot in
a week's time. I'm sure you can guess what I did first thing Sunday
morning after the dew was gone from all that grass!
"I have been a stranger in a strange land."
- Hebrew Bible. Moses, in Exodus 2:22
Tom Fisher
Purdue University (USA)
Email: fishertrin@gmail.com
Tom's Netlink Site http://www.nlci.com/users/fishers/
Tom's Purdue Site http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~fishertr/
Copyright © 2003 - Thomas R. Fisher, All Rights Reserved.