Road Trip to IOWA

Last weekend, Katherine and I decided to take a road trip to Iowa to visit Warren, since he took the time to visit Chicago a couple times over the summer. Besides, doesn't everyone aspire to travel to Iowa one day? Right.

As we drove to Cedar Rapids, we passed a Hummer dealership (there were actually very few non-American cars on the road) and the world's largest truck stop. Seriously, we're talking about a big mother-trucker, 2 1/2 times the size of Disneyland. I started to worry about the fact that this state has a caucus, and that it matters. Is Iowa a representative slice of the country, a swing state? I've been living in blue areas for so long that I can't remember what America's "heartland" is like.

Cedar Rapids is an industrial town in eastern Iowa, home to a number of manufacturing plants, agricultural warehouses, and a Super Walmart and a Super Target (whoa!). The town slogan is "the City of 5 Seasons," where the 5th season is the time you spend appreciating the other four. (No joke.) Outside of Cedar Rapids, the town is also popularly known as Cedar Crapids, or the City of 5 Smells. After driving past the Quaker Oats factory and through Warren's corn processing plant, I have now smelled two of the five smells, and hope to never experience the other three. Despite the questionable odor, driving around the corn processing plant was kind of neat. Have you ever wondered where high fructose corn syrup comes from? Glucose? Maltodextrin? All the ingredients in tiny print that go into every processed food you buy, well they start percolating right here.

For the most part though, the town had all the chain restaurants and shopping malls you could want, the usual assemblage of IHOPs, Applebees' and Olive Gardens. Then there were local oddities, like the Kum & Go gas stations and Culver's, which featured "frozen custard butterburgers." Ironically, the latter was located next to an emergency healthcare clinic. For dinner, I decided to veto going to Pei's Mandarin, advertising the "best oriental food in east Iowa," and opted for a Mexican place instead.

Speaking of Asians, we were browsing the Wikipedia article on Cedar Rapids and came across the demographics section. The town's population includes 0.06% people of Asian descent, so with a population of around 120,000, this comes out to...72 Asians. That would mean my presence in Cedar Rapids handily increased the Asian population by over 1%.

Since the Wikipedia article was sadly devoid of appealing attractions in Cedar Rapids (Czech & Slovak Museum, anyone?), I jokingly suggested that we go to the Planet X Fun Center. After all, how can you possibly go wrong with a place that has space bikes, bowlingo, and laser tag? The answer is: many, many ways. Perhaps this is why beer buckets were on sale, with 5 beers for $10. After surveying the turtle-slow bumper cars and the light-up alien whacking game with half of its lights burnt out, we decided to spring for a round of mini-golf. The course was actually fairly difficult, but I miraculously came away with 3 hole-in-ones and won by one point!

Later that night, we drove to Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, to meet up with Andrew, Warren's new boyfriend. Andrew was super nice, and also super tall. At 6'9", he towered over my 5'1" self, and we bonded over how it was difficult for both of us to find clothing that fit. In the meantime, Iowa City was much cuter than Cedar Rapids, with a nice pedestrian mall, ample bars, and a Pita Pit! I never frequented Pita Pit much as an undergrad, but it was still refreshing to see one of the late night food joints (DP Dough, Wings Over) you typically see in college towns. Unfortunately, the gay bar was kind of dead on this particular night, so we dropped into another bar, packed with screaming sorostitutes, frat boys, and girls wearing ugly Christmas sweaters and mini-skirts. Even my jello shot could not stave off my irritation with this bar; this is why I never went to anything but Stella's while at Cornell. And, I don't know if I've aged that much in the last 5 months, but somehow everyone seemed to look really young. Maybe this is one more step along the road to becoming an old fogey.

Back at Andrew's house, his housemate Marta had offered to let us sleep in her bed, since she was in Madison for the weekend. I never thought I'd be sleeping in the bed of the lesbian roommate of the boyfriend of my friend's gay friend in Iowa. Also, Marta had a Moosewood cookbook on her bookshelf, which meant my respect for her automatically doubled.

The drive back was rather a bitch. Freezing rain had been coming down all weekend, and the roads were pretty icy. I stopped for gas at a BP, which had a wretched-looking church next door, with a sign that read, "No Jesus, no peace. Know Jesus, know peace." After we properly mocked the church and its sign, I pulled away and began to turn onto the highway on-ramp. Except I kept turning, and in a slow skid, the rear end of my car fishtailed 180 degrees. It was my first major skid, and I felt oddly calm during the experience, as though I were looking down on the scene from afar. Luckily, the cars around us had stopped to stare blankly at us, and no one got hit. And hey, it wouldn't be a road trip without a near-death experience to cap it off, right?