Yesterday the old man (my dad!) and I went off on a small photography trip. He had a couple of places marked that he wanted to see, and since I took the day off, I was more than willing to chauffer him around for a while.

Our first stop was  Wildcat Den State Park, which is about 20 minutes away from our house.  I had driven through it to go hunting one time, but had never stopped to take a look around.  As far as parks go in Iowa, it’s a pretty neat place. We went and took pictures of the non-functional, non-wheel grist mill on Potters Creek (this is the photo by the way!). After blasting through a few pictures there we headed back to the Jeep to continue our adventure.  However just as we got to the Jeep, and didn’t have the bazooka, we saw this bright yellow and black birds. And then an orange one, we think it’s an oriole, came through our vision. So we stopped and tried to get pictures of them, but they are some damn flighty that we weren’t able to get any pictures.

Next we stopped in Muscatine (home of Mark Twain) for some breakfast.  I’d seen someone from Flickr post up a picture of Twain’s house so I thought it would be cool to go take some pictures of it.  However when I asked the waitress about where Twain’s house was we got a “I’ll go ask” and an answer of “no one knows. But there is a Twain Estates out by the bypass”.  I said thanks and shook my head.

After breakfast we drove down to the dinky town of Connesville, Iowa, where I’m pretty sure that the population is made up of mostly Hispanic migrant workers who work on the melon farms out there.  Contrary to what my dad believes we have more than corn out here, but it’s mostly corn. We were looking for a swamp area that he had mapped out. So we drove down a country road for about 3 miles and found it. There wasn’t much there, except for lots of frogs and dragonflies.

Today’s wanderings are taking us up to northern Iowa and Illinois where the wife will be dropped off in Galena Illinois and we will be headed over to Iowa for some picture taking. We are hoping to get to the Bellvue butterfly garden, but we will see.  I have my doubts about this butterfly garden.