Iowa Adventures

When life hands you lemons...blog about them.  That's what I say, anyway.  When I'm feeling very bored or very frustrated, I frequently think, "Okay, how could I turn this into a blog post?"  Then I end up with posts like THIS ONE or THIS ONE or THIS ONE.  Some of my favorite posts, actually, came from junky situations.

I was trying to use this same philosophy in the car today as I drove eleven hours to Middle of Nowhere, Iowa.  I have to be here for an education conference, and I rode down with two middle-aged male teachers.  I was thankful for the ride, but it was still really boring.  I decided that maybe I could blog about it, but even the blog post would be boring.  This would be it:

Look - some corn!
More corn
More corn
More corn
Ew, someone farted
More corn
"Wow, they must be using some fertilizer here," says one of the teachers.
I know the smell of fertilizer, Farty McFarter, and that's not it.  But I'll nod in agreement to make you think you tricked me.
More corn
More corn
More corn

See?  Not much to say.  I wasn't even going to blog about it, but then my evening turned into a bit of an adventure so I decided to blog about it after all.  The teachers dropped me off at my hotel (15 minutes away from their hotel...not sure why).   It is in a tiny Iowa town on the outskirts of...well...thousands of acres of corn.  The nearest city is over an hour away.  Great place for a conference.  Good planning, team.

I was waiting for my friend Trish to get into town (she flew in from Washington state), and we were going to get dinner together.  She had a car, which was a great plus, and the school was going to pay for dinner so we could go somewhere fancy (though I realized "fancy" was going to be a relative term in this town).  By eight o'clock, I was getting pretty hungry.  Finally Trish texted me, but instead of saying she was on her way to pick me up, she bailed out and said she was too tired to come get me and get dinner!  Junk!  I was pretty disappointed, especially since I had been waiting for her and hadn't seen her in a few months.  I called the front desk and asked if there were any restaurants within walking distance of the hotel, and the receptionist sounded genuinely surprised: "Walking distance?  Oh... No, I don't think so.  There is a convenience store a few blocks down...they have chips and stuff...  Other than that, not really."

Great.  I was alone in the middle of a cornfield with only chips as a dinner option.  At least they would probably be corn chips, which are infinitely better than potato.  So there's a silver lining.

I was frustrated and hungry, so I decided to at least go for a walk and see what I could find.  It was better than being cooped up in my lonely hotel room for the rest of the evening.  I walked down the street and almost immediately saw a place called "Lighthouse Bar and Grill."  What luck!  A beacon for my hungry stomach!  I hurried over to the restaurant and saw, to my dismay, that it was closed.  Actually, it looked like it had been closed for the majority of the twenty-first century.  What a shame.

I walked a few blocks farther, and I didn't see much of anything.  I was starting to get very frustrated, and then it started to rain.  I literally glared at the sky as if to say "Really right now?  Really?"  Ugh.  I found the convenience store, but everything looked gross.  I decided to keep hunting and then save the chips as my back-up plan.

I walked along the line of mostly closed stores for a few blocks (I even took a picture just to show you!), and I finally came to a Taco Bell wannabe store called Taco John's.  It was open, so I decided to go inside and investigate the dinner options.  There was no one at the counter, and finally a girl came out and said, "Oh!  Someone will be right with you."  Then she yelled into the back at someone, and a pimply blonde teenage boy came out to take my order.  I started by saying, "I saw your ad for the Santa Fe burrito...it looks pretty good.  Is it good?  Have you had it?"  Pimples stared at me for a second and then said, "No."  Okay, no problem.  I tried again: "Okay, well I've never been here before.  What  have you tried that you would suggest?"  Pimples looked at me as if I were an alien, then shrugged and said, "I've tried a lot of things.  A lot of things are good."  Great customer service, friend.  You are well on your way to making it out of this tiny corn town.  I decided to go with the Santa Fe burrito just to get this ordering experience over with, and I went to fill up my water cup.

When I got my burrito, I must admit that it wasn't bad.  That could be because I was starving, but I guess we will never know.  The problem wasn't the flavor, it was that our local Taco John's team could not wrap a burrito if their corn fields depended on it.  The burrito was so messy that it was falling apart in my hands.  I got up to grab some napkins, and I had to hold my hands up in front of me so that they wouldn't drip.  I looked like a burrito surgeon just coming out of the operating room.  "Sorry doc...the Santa Fe didn't make it."  I grabbed the napkins and finally resorted to eating the burrito with a spoon (not even a fork - a SPOON), but the flavor was good so I wasn't too cranky about it.  It was better than a dinner of chips.

After eating at Taco John's, I started the trek through the rain back to my hotel.  I noticed that a cute place called Olivia's Bakery was open across the street, and I decided to check it out.  A yummy cupcake from a tiny family-run bakery was just what I needed for a pick-me-up after my horrible day.  Picture "Olivia's Bakery" in your head for me a second.  What do you think it looks like?  Who's Olivia?  I was picturing a little old lady who loves to bake, and maybe her granddaughters run the cute pastel-colored shop as their summer job or something.

WELL.  That's not what it was.  As soon as I walked in, I regretted it.  It was a dirty, grimy establishment run by a twenty-something Mexican who glared at me as soon as I walked in as if to say, "Por que estas aqui, gringa??"  That's right, dude.  I just translated your mean glare.  Into SPANISH.  All of the signs on all of the baked goods and all of the directions written on the displays were in Spanish, and Spanish TV was playing in the background.  No English translations were anywhere to be found.  I speak Spanish (ish), so I could read all of the signs.  It was mostly stuff like, "Don't touch the bread!" and "Don't grab the cookies with your hands!"   While Mr. "Olivia" watched me like a hawk, I tried to find something to buy.  They didn't have cupcakes.  They didn't have anything yummy.  They had jalenpeno doughnuts, which sounds like a horrible idea.  They also had cookies shaped like pigs, which made me wonder if they were pig flavored or simply pig shaped?  They had butter cookies, walnut cookies, and a bunch of varieties of Taquitos.  Ew.  I looked around for a while, but I didn't see anything I wanted.  I had to buy something, though, because this guy was staring daggers into me and I didn't want to make him mad.  That's a good business tactic, actually - frighten your customers into buying things.  Finally I decided to pay fifty cents for a cookie that promised to be "muy delicioso," but it wasn't.

I walked back in the rain, eating just the sprinkles off of my cookie (because it's really hard to ruin sprinkles) and generally feeling pretty sorry for myself.  Then I thought, "Forget that, Christine.  Just go blog about it, and the whole ordeal won't seem so awful."

And you know what?  I was right.  I feel better.  Now I'll kick back in my room and watch some *gasp!* cable TV.  Bring on tomorrow's conference.