Up through Iowa...

With classes resuming on Monday, I felt the need to get at least one small road trip in before nearly all of my time is spent working or studying. After mulling several destinations in my mind, I took off and headed somewhere entirely different at the last minute, up through Iowa's so-called Great Lakes to Minnesota.

While the weather refused to fully cooperate, I made the best of it and explored quite a few places I had never been before.

near Kimballtown, Iowa

Manilla, Iowa

Spirit Lake at Orleans, Iowa

Also visited: Elk Horn, Irwin, Aspinwall, Vail, Westside, Wall Lake, Early, Rembrandt, Sioux Rapids, Greenville, Spencer, Milford and Spirit Lake, Iowa.

Telephonic miscellany

While certainly not the best photographic instrument the world has ever seen, a cell phone camera is almost always handy and ready for action. Here are a few random shots from so far this year...

What's in a name?

In search of no place in particular...

Some days, I wake up and feel the need to head out on a highway somewhere, the end destination somehow unimportant. Today was one of those days. I chose to head east into Iowa, ending up as far from Omaha as the wonderfully named (yet quite unimpressive in reality) Defiance, Iowa.

I've been reading William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways off-and-on for the past month or so. It's a great book, one man's travels through rural America in the early 1980's, and Heat-Moon's writing makes me want to take off cross-country even more than usual. Little day trips like this will have to suffice for the moment. School starts up again in less than a month and my wallet is even lighter than usual.

The photographs above and immediately below were both made in the small, small town of Westphalia, Iowa. The last one comes from Woodbine.

Also visited: Carson, Oakland, Hancock, Avoca, Harlan, Earling, Panama and Portsmouth, Iowa.