On The Road Again

Shannon's gig at the University of Iowa Hospital ended on Friday, July 24 and after a busy day of packing up RIGBY on Saturday and enjoying a taco feast with our friends Sam, Rachel and Lisa, we hit the road Sunday morning.Our original plan was was to head up to Wisconsin to see Racine and Hartland where Tim's folks grew up, but the midwest combination of heat and humidity has driven us away. We need to find cooler climes where we sweat on our terms.So instead we headed north to Waterloo and then west along highway 3 (we've found we like to avoid interstates when we have time) and made our way to Humboldt, Iowa. Shannon had heard from her dad that years ago he had gone to a funeral for his grandfather in Iowa, and her friend at work had told her about findagrave.com.Along the way we saw a few more bike paths and were again impressed with how much biking infrastructure we've seen in Iowa.Union Cemetery in Humboldt is a lot larger than we expected and we were quite daunted trying to find our way around. A map in the back showed some information, but nothing to orient you as to which direction was which and to make things worse, only some of the sections had markers indicating their section number. So after about 30 minutes of traipsing around we called it quits.We found a nice little campground just south of Humboldt (Frank Gotch State Park) where east and west forks combine to become the Des Moines river, and paid for one night. Cell service (and therefore wifi from our phones' personal hotspots) was pretty low, so we tried our signal booster for the first time and were impressed that we went from 2 bars to 4 bars. This got Shannon online sleuthing how to find graves and she came up with a new plan.It was such a nice quiet campground we paid for a second night and decided to give the cemetery another chance. We checked to see if there was a reasonable way to get to the cemetery by bikes and discovered the Three Rivers Trail that went past the campground about 50 feet behind our campsite, and all the way into town (except for a portion that a local farmer did not allow so we had to ride the road for that part).At the cemetery, Shannon's sleuthing was successful and she found Great-Great-Great-Grandfather (wait for it...) CHESTER'S grave! Chester Dean, born in 1836, died in 1882. And what a monument on his grave - 134 years old and difficult to read the etching of his name, but that was it!We also found Great-Great-Grandfather Frank Dean's grave over in a different section so it was a very successful excursion.Another night at Frank Gotch State Park and off to Nebraska on Tuesday. To be continued...