Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

June 18, 2015: US 61 still runs through Lancaster, Wisconsin, despite WI 129 being an obvious bypass route. Going through town is a less-straight alignment for 61.

A roadgeek meeting in Madison plus a two-day summer trip offered chances to go after my nearest untraveled significant stretches of US highways in southwest Wisconsin. As part of my trip to the first event, I did US 14 from east of the point it meets US 61 near Viroqua to I-39/90 at Janesville. For the second, I could pick up where that left off.

US 61 in Wisconsin runs through the heart of the Driftless Area, offering lovely scenery from a gently winding two-lane. It exits the state with US 14 at La Crosse. Near the south end, right after it splits from US 151, is the Dickeyville Grotto.

Less than three weeks before that, I drove to Fort Madison to go on the US 61 bypass for the first time since its opening. That’s the second time I’ve had to re-drive part of US 61, the other being its reroute onto I-80 and I-280, and I’ll have to do it again when the four-lane to Grandview is completed. Now the only stoplights along mainline US 61 in Iowa are in Muscatine, Burlington, and Dubuque.

I’ve now been on US 61 from downtown St. Paul to where it leaves I-64 west of downtown St. Louis, and then off and on at points south of there to Memphis.

When I looked at the towns in Iowa I had yet to visit, I noticed many of them were on the periphery of the state. Then, I noticed that my least-recently-visited counties were also on the periphery of the state. Combine that with the facts I had never traveled county-road parts of the Great River Road in Iowa nor spent much time exploring the Loess Hills, and you have a recipe for Around the State in Eight Days.

The up-and-down in northwest Iowa was to strategically hit new towns; the chunk taken out of the west was to do the Loess Hills instead of I-29 on the floodplain. The short straight and almost-straight horizontal lines at the northwest and northeast corners along with much of the middle mark the approximate location of the northern border. The extra squiggles in Lee County are from an overnight stay and backtracking south of Montrose.

September 28, 2015: View from Great River Road scenic overlook at Balltown in Dubuque County.

This trip was my only venture into far western and southern Iowa in 2015. The rest of the year was spent east of an Armstrong-Des Moines-Keokuk line. However, I had both by circumstance and strategy done a lot of traveling on the other side of that line in 2014.

The trip covered more than 1700 miles and 1300 pictures. I learned a lot on this trip, and I will eventually bring it in bite-size blog posts and/or a photo gallery*. On the eight-day journey, I only spent 5½ hours outside the state (not counting where the road was on the state line).

October 1, 2015: View from Loess Hills scenic overlook between Pisgah and Little Sioux in Harrison County.

Doing the Great River Road in Iowa requires three solid days (at least), but it’s worth it.

*Wow, it has been a long time since I put up a photo gallery. I should publicize that link more.

December 31, 2005: A photo I didn’t use so long ago of a fan-made sign at the ISU-TCU Houston Bowl. Remember the chaos at the end of the Nebraska-Michigan Alamo Bowl? Remember when instant replay in college football wasn’t a thing? Remember when Nebraska and Michigan were in different conferences? Remember when ISU and TCU were in different conferences?

The 2005 season was a barrel of what-ifs for Iowa State football. If the Cyclones had won any one of the three games lost in overtime, Dan McCarney would’ve given ISU its second eight-win regular season since Earle Bruce and the sacrificial-lamb position against Texas in the Big 12 Championship. Unlike certain other fanbases with seven-win seasons, though, ISU fans were enthusiastic about a bowl game in warm weather.

I wrote a blog of sorts for the Register on the trip, and talked about visiting the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial, Dealey Plaza, Texas’ and Texas A&M’s football stadiums, NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and Galveston.

The Houston Bowl pitted the Cyclones against the one-loss TCU Horned Frogs, champions of the Mountain West Conference. ISU trailed much of the game and lost 27-24. The following year, McCarney was fired in a 4-8 season and ISU AD Jamie Pollard went after the defensive coordinator of an undefeated Texas team that won what turned out to be the last non-SEC national title for nearly a decade.

Back then, the Big 12 had 12 teams, the Pac-10 had 10, the Big Ten had 11, and we could make fun of a conference that couldn’t count. Things were simpler back then. In the decade since, ISU has hired three football coaches, undergone a total logo redesign/rebranding, gone 1-2 in bowl games, hasn’t had another seven-win regular season, and nearly got tossed into the Sarlacc pit relegated in the college athletics universe twice. TCU is now a fellow member of the Big 12.

But I’m still mostly taking the same-size pictures. The ones that aren’t blurry make the Houston Bowl trip seem like yesterday, even if it was (already) a decade ago.

With 2540 pages of new books to read, added to 1250 pages from last year, what better thing to do than make some year-end posts?

On June 8, I completed a goal I had been building toward for more than a decade. I finished traveling every mile of every currently existing highway in Iowa. Here’s the original blog post and photo collage I made announcing it.

That title was lost with the reroute of US 71 and creation of IA 471 at the end of the year, but I will reclaim it at some point.