Coming Home

We were up and out of the Sioux City Super 8 early since we had a long day of driving ahead of us. We had planned longer days of driving on Wednesday and Friday so we could take time at Mt. Rushmore and especially at Badlands National Park. Nothing in Iowa, Illinois or Indiana particularly interested us on this trip, so we planned to put a lot of miles under our wheels today. After being away for two weeks, we were looking forward to being home and sleeping in our own bed.

We took US Rt. 20 for 200 miles to Waterloo, Iowa. Rt. 20 was really more like an Interstate highway so we made good time. We took I-380 from Waterloo to Iowa City. It had been over 20 years since I was in Iowa City. I did some test development contract work for ACT while teaching at Cabell Midland High School, and we met at their headquarters near Iowa City. They took me to some interesting nearby attractions including the Amana Colony, Herbert Hoover’s birthplace and other local attractions. We made a note to return here some day but kept moving today. At Iowa City we took I-80 a short distance to Davenport where to got on I-74, which took us through Peoria, Bloomington, Champaign and into Indianapolis. We hit major construction in Indy that really slowed us down. Most of the construction was in the southwest corner of I-465 so we considered taking I-70 from Indianapolis to west Louisville then backtracking east to Georgetown. However, traffic appeared to be bad toward Louisville as well, so we stayed the course and made our way to I-74 which brought us to Cincinnati. We caught I-275 to Erlanger, KY where we got on our familiar I-75.

We were home a little after 10 pm, unpacked a few of our things, then went to bed. We planned to leave around 9:30 on Saturday morning to meet the Koehlers at Oktoberfest Zinzinnati.