Jeff dances (badly) all over Iowa

See one Jeff Hoskinson dance very badly all over Iowa...

Jeff got around…including to:

*The American Gothic house in Eldon

*Points of great Iowa cheesiness, including Adair’s smiley face water tower, McGregor’s Spook Cave, and the pink elephant in Marquette

*The old frontier fort in Fort Madison

*Lake Okoboji (one of only 3 blue water lakes in the world, the others being Lake Geneva in Switzerland and Lake Louise in Canada)

*The Blue Bunny dairy facility (Blue Bunny ice cream is amazing! but I hate their slick new logo) in LeMars, where I used to attend St. George’s Episcopal Church, a relic of a wee British immigration wave in the 1880’s into NW Iowa (spoiler: they pretty much all ended up going back to England *chuckle*)

*Some of Iowa’s more than 100 state and national parks (alas, not “Call Park” where I spend 100’s of hours with friends when I was growing up in Algona)

*That damn cornfield in Dyersville (I hated Field of Dreams)

*The Surf Ball Room in Clear Lake (where Buddy Holly, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, and 17 year-old Ritchie Valens performed before all three tragically perished later that night when their plane crashed after taking off from Clear Lake in a blizzard—the event Don McLean in the song “America Pie” refers to as “The Day the Music Died”)

*The Little Brown Church in the Vale (72,300 weddings (and counting) since 1855—one of which was that of my uncle and aunt Sid and Kathy Buffington)

*John Wayne’s birthplace in Winterset

*The Roman Catholic kitsch extravaganza that is the nonetheless oddly impressive Grotto of Redemption in West Bend

*One of the old covered bridges of Madison County

*The Vogel windmill in Orange City (the town where I went to college—“Orange” as in the Dutch royal house of Oranje, by the way, not the color -- which didn’t stop the town from idiotically painting their water tower orange. )

*The Sergeant Floyd Monument in Sioux City

*The old double-track railroad bridge in Boone (over the Des Moines River, which likes to flood)

*The wind farm in Alta

*Iowa high school football, one of Iowa’s two unofficial religions (the other being college wrestling) even makes an appearance, as well as RAGBRAI, of course

And more. Of course, there are countless conspicuous absences, like Effigy Mounds National Monument, the Old Capital in Iowa City, the Iowa Wine Trail, and . . . . . . the world’s largest Chee-to in, yes, Algona.