Life on the farm

The last day of our fun weekend. We got up a little later than we normally do because of the storm last night and after a shower and breakfast we were putting together our plans for the day.

We decided to head back home and then along the way we stopped off at the Floyd County Museum in Charles City.

Now if you’re wondering what this museum has in it, well honestly so were we. It’s one of those places where we’ve literally driven by it about a million times going to other places. But today we decided we had the time so we were going to check it out.

Holy Cow! This place is HUGE! From the outside we thought we’d be in there for about 20 minutes to an hour but I think we were in there for around 2 hours and probably didn’t even see everything.

The whole reason that we decided to stop is because Daryl is an Oliver kind of guy and this was an Oliver Museum.  His favorite tractors are Olivers and if you have been around any farmer, these guys are very L O Y A L  to their brands. And for Daryl and his dad? They liked Oliver tractors.

Now getting back to this museum as you can guess they have all Oliver tractors because the factory that built these tractors was located in Charles City, Iowa.But the museum has tons more than just tractors. They have a Olympic torch that was carried through the town for the Olympic games in Atlanta in 1996, they have a lot of old buggies and more fossils and other artifacts than you can count.

Just one of the many display cases

They have the whole upstairs set up in individual rooms as if someone lived there and they even moved the inside of a one room school house for a display. I don’t have enough room on this post to say what they all have there and with the cost of only $5 to go into it and it’s definitely some place that everyone should go visit once!

This is a Mail buggy and it even had a heater inside. 

One of the many rooms in the museum

Here is a picture of the Hart-Parr 40 that was build built between 1912 to 1914. With only 197 built during that time, this tractor might be the only original one left.

Here is the funniest thing that I think that I saw today. Who says you can’t learn something new everyday? Check out what the saying says-

But the main attraction was the tractors. I think Daryl was in Oliver heaven! It brought back a lot of memories for him when he was working with his dad farming and it was pretty cool listening to him tell some old stories that I hadn’t heard before. Here is a picture that I took with Daryl in the middle of all the tractors. It’s kind of hard to see him but he’s there.

Now it’s time to head home and get ready for the upcoming week. We had a chance to skype with Kyle tonight and to also check in with William.

Without spending tons of money, we sure had a lot of fun and we need to do this more often!

Cheers to weekend get-aways! Whoo Hoo!!

It’s Saturday! Whoo Hoo!!

Our fun weekend continues and we weren’t sure just what we were going to do. Then all of a sudden Daryl said let’s head to Des Moines and that’s all it took for me. We decided to leave in about 90 minutes and it was cutting it close to get the dishes done, the outside chores all taken care of, and a quick shower and to pack.

But sometimes that makes the adventure don’t you think? Well I do anyway. You might think it’s stressful, but I think it makes it exciting!

So while I was working on stuff in the kitchen, Daryl got the chores done really well and got the car ready. We literally threw some clothes in a bag, grabbed our shoes, and off we went. It’s about a three hour trip which gave us plenty of time to talk about what we can do once we got there.

Now I’m usually a planner but there was nothing planned about his trip!

So we weren’t sure just where we were going to stay for the night and after trying to get some good deals on a web site that you bid on your hotel room (I found out that I’m really pretty cheap and none of my offers were accepted) we finally booked a room using my phone about 3 minutes before walking into the lobby of the hotel. So now we had the hotel and an open schedule.

The Iowa Cubs were playing that night in town and that sure sounded like a great idea. So we went downtown to grab something to eat and check out the scene before heading to the stadium. The weather was around 82 degrees with a small breeze. Man it was going to be a great night! There was some Republican Candidate giving a speech and since I’m not really that Republican we went down to check out the big flag and listen to someone who was on ‘The Voice’ sing the National Anthem and then we left. I never knew that you can just close down a street if you want to but I guess if you have enough money you can do about anything.Now it was time to go to the baseball stadium. We’ve been to this stadium a couple of years ago and with our tickets only costing $6.00 each, how can you go wrong?

The ball game was good and it seemed like they were giving away free stuff all night. They would come around and throw things out to the crowd or give prizes if you were in a certain section and specific seats. Tons of fun!

Just hanging out before the game started. We’re getting pretty good at this ‘selfie’ thing

But seriously the funniest thing that I’ve even seen in my life was when they came out on a cart and started to shoot something up into the crowd.

Can you see what they are shooting?

Now if you’ve gone to these types of games before, you know that you would probably be expecting tee shirts that they would be shooting up at people right? Yea, that’s what we thought also. But can you guess what they were shooting? Now if you guessed HOT DOGS you are the Winner! Yup, Hot Dogs! Isn’t that about the craziest thing you’ve ever heard? I snapped a picture quick and even though it’s not the clearest you can get the idea. We laughed so hard until we almost couldn’t breathe. And then a little bit later a guy was coming around selling vendor food but this time it was funnel cakes. That is a great food anyway and at a baseball game? Well what a way to enjoy a baseball game!

I wish he would have come around one more time by us!

Man life is good if you come to these Iowa Cub games! Later they were shooting out tee shirts and if I was about an inch taller I would have had one. It just skimmed my fingers and the guy behind me caught it. Now that would have topped the whole night off wouldn’t it!

When the game was over, we drove the car back and decided to walk down to Buzzard Billy’s to check it out. I mean with a name like that it can only be fun right? And when we got in there the bartender came over and said that someone bought us a drink . What? Here there was someone from our home town in Buzzard Billy’s. It sure is a small world isn’t it!

We got back to our hotel room kinda late and when we turned on the TV we found out that there was a storm that was identified 6 miles from us and they said that to expect damage to your vehicles because of hail and 60 mile an hour winds. Also to go to lower grounds and away from outside windows. Not cool. Daryl put his shoes back on and went to get the car and parked it under the lobby overhang. And while he was outside I was watching the TV and I honestly felt like I was on the movie ‘Twister’. If you remember the scene the lady is in the hotel bed at the drive in theater hotel and the TV was on and said that a storm was coming. Then she’d look outside and the wind would be picking up and it started to rain. It didn’t dawn on me that I was feeling like this lady in the movie until the wind picked up and I slowly looked outside to see what was going on. But I was just really hoping that my little reenactment wasn’t going to have the same outcome as the movie did.  (the whole town was destroyed!) But I have to admit I was getting nervous because every 30 seconds they were saying that we were going to get hit with a storm. But thank goodness it kind of fizzled out and we only got about 30 mph winds and no hail. Whew! Daryl waited it out until the heavy rain was over and parked the car again. It made it kind of a short night but heck we didn’t have anything planned yet for tomorrow so we were good.

Now as Day 2 of our weekend came to a close it we both agreed that we had a great time!

The Iowa Cubs won their game 3 – 0

With my brother’s birthday just around the corner, we were off to a concert for .38 Special who was performing at a local county fair to help celebrate the occasion.

It seems like this year we’ve gone to quite a few concerts and it’s really a great gig if you ask me. I mean how much fun is it to see live music once in awhile? 

So tonight the weather was around 80 degrees with a slight breeze going through the fairgrounds. Can you say perfect weather? And you just know it’s going to be fun when you walk into the area and bump into our nephew and niece.

The area was packed and with the music loud there wasn’t a bad spot in the audience. So today’s picture of the day is a close up of the band.