Last fall, we took a relaxed trip to Bob & Kate's house in the Quad Cities. I say "relaxed" because we took our time and stopped at several RoadsideAmerica.com places on the way. If you are traveling lazily across country, I highly recommend this website, you never know what you will come upon. Apparently, there is a phone booth in a small town in Iowa that you go stand next to for a minute or so. The neighbors keep an eye on it and will call you to say "Hello!" We haven't tried it yet, but it makes me smile to imagine.
Anyway, we stopped in Mason City (now on my short list of places I can imagine living) and went to The Music Man Museum.
It is a ridiculously fancy indoor copy of the street in the Music Man movie, complete with store fronts and ice cream shop and popcorn stand.
It is built next to the childhood home of Meredith Wilson, who wrote the movie. A tour of the home is included in admission. It was neat, and a lovely place to stop to stretch our legs. The coolest part about it is that they have space inside for the community to use for events and performances, as well as upstairs rooms for music lessons.
A double bell euphonium (if you listen closely to the song, you'll hear them mention this)
Bob and Kate's house was fun, as always! They have a lovely, comfortable house, a funny puppy, and a pinball machine. What else do two kids need?
We stopped by a nearby park that has statues from George Seurat's Sunday in the Park painting.
This painting just keeps showing up in our lives. When we first met, Jim told me how much he likes it, so we have a copy of it hanging at the top of the stairs. We went to the Guthrie Theater this summer to watch a play based on it. And here it is again!
And there's a tank to climb on in the same park :)
John Deere has a super cool pavilion with a bunch of their equipment to check out and videos of them working and video games where you can try to work them on your own.
This was really neat for all of us.
And we met Max. He's their super fun puppy that is a lot more fun for the kids to play with than lazy old Ava. Our favorite is that instead of "down", you say "go flat Max", and he does this. Love it!
