Wintering, 2021 - Galena IL & Davenport IA

 

I am writing this on a Sunday morning from a room on the 4th floor of a Hampton Inn in Davenport, Iowa.  The window overlooks the parking lot of a shopping center.  Because of the Covid-19 crisis, the parking lot is empty.  Davenport has had quite a lot of snow recently, and now the temperature has plunged - currently sitting at 15 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The parking lot looks deadly in the thin grey morning light.  I saw a couple of burly guys struggle to free a tow truck stuck in that parking lot last night.

About a week ago, I was in Galena and rented a cabin in the woods.  The snow hit, and I took a picture of the deck off the kitchen - the pic is at the top of this post.  I couldn't get out of the joint for several hours - a snowdrift blocked the door and there was no snow shovel. The managers of the property cleared it away around lunchtime.  I was happy to be trapped, surrounded by the winter's hush in the woods.

I am now visiting one of my adult children who is currently staying in Davenport.  It isn't a bad place - the pace is a lot slower than Chicago, and the folks here see things much differently than us urbanites.  The good citizens of Davenport have declared that the pandemic is over - the restaurants and bars were packed last night, and mask discipline is pretty weak.  That's why I split a take-out pizza with my kid in the hotel room last night.

Lots of mid-sized cities have interesting histories, and Davenport is no exception.  Davenport is a river town; the Mississippi is its major geographic feature.  River towns tend to be kind of racy.  Davenport had a lot of bordellos and speakeasies during the Prohibition years, and once was called "the wickedest city in America" by the national press.  It is also Bix Beiderbecke's hometown.  If you have never heard of Bix, that's OK - he is not well-known to the general public.   He was a giant of the jazz cornet in the 1920's.  You may have heard Royal Garden Blues, considered one of the most important jazz recordings in history.  Bix was a tragic character.  He drank himself to death in his Queens, New York apartment in the summer of 1931.  He was only 28 years old when he died. So Davenport has the Bix Beiderbecke Museum downtown near the Mississippi River.  There is a Bix festival and many other Bix-related organizations and events here.  Davenport also was the location of America's first college of chiropractic medicine. You can lay factoid that on your chiropractor when you visit for your next adjustment.

I am here to spend time with my adult offspring.  I won't bore you with the details, but this child of mine has been struggling.  I love this young person to death and I am here to help if possible.  I have no idea how things will turn out.  I know if I force an outcome, things probably won't improve.

I have no power over anyone else's actions or reactions.  I only have control over my own actions and reactions.  Even that is sometimes more than I can handle.

The sun is breaking through the cloud cover now, so I will head out to see what Davenport has in store for me today.

Down the Great River Road (aka the Blues Highway) - Quad Cities and Iowa

I loaded up the Volvo wagon with two teenagers, my lovely wife and the ratdog for an old-fashioned road trip vacation. We headed west from Chicago to the Quad Cities (Moline IL, Rock Island IL, Davenport IA and Bettendorf IA). These four towns hug both banks of the Mississippi. Our plan was to pick up Highway 61 in Iowa and head south. US 61 is called "The Great River Road" since it hugs the Mississippi for much of its length. It is also called "The Blues Highway" since it was the path out of the Mississippi Delta region travelled by the many blues musicians that headed north to Chicago after World War II. US 61 has been eclipsed by the major interstates nearby. The traffic levels on the historic road have dropped. It is a 2-lane highway in some stretches. It was perfect.

We spent our first night in Moline IL, home of Deere & Company (aka John Deere). Deere's profits doubled in the first quarter of 2011 (compared to the first quarter of 2010). Big Green made about $514MM (which is indeed Big Green). Lots of folks around the world want to buy a new Deere tractor, I guess. The farm economy is doing pretty well due to the spike in crop prices. Our pain is Deere's gain. Moline seems to be booming along with Deere & Co.; the tractor maker is the largest employer in the Quad Cities.

We stayed at the Stoney Creek Inn, located on the Illinois side of the mighty Mississippi. The hotel is owned by a regional chain that plays up the "Northwoods" motif - stone fireplaces, old wooden signs, moose heads, etc. The most remarkable part of the stay was the presence of the LPA Convention ("LPA" stands for "Little People's Association"). The hotel was full of dwarves and the people who love them. They were a fine group of folks, although dwarves like to party late into the evening, I learned. It was not a good place to sleep.

We also hit Davenport IA, a lovely town with a great art museum on the banks for the Mississippi (the Figge Art Museum, a sizable institution with a surprisingly large permanent collection of work by Mexican, Haitian and Midwestern artists). Unfortunately, the Figge is closed on Sunday so we could only admire the beautiful building, which was completed in August 2005. Davenport is also the home of the late, great Bix Beiderbecke. Along with Louis Armstrong, Bix transformed the role of the trumpet in popular/jazz music in the 1920's. Bix was a huge alcholic and died of the disease at the ripe old age of 28. The City of Davenport celebrates this native son every year with the Bix Biederbecke Memorial Jazz Festival.

We hit the local Quad City Botanical Center (where it was Pirate Day - I don't know why the pirates were being celebrated in a huge greenhouse next to the Mississippi River). After that odd experience, we headed south on US 61 to Burlington IA - home of the Lady Liberty facsimile pictured above. Burlington is also the home of Snake Alley, allegedly the "crookedest" street in the world (it looks like a smaller version of Lombard Street in San Francisco). There are some lovely old churches in Burlington (some are available for sale if you have a yearning to own a 19th century house of worship).

We continued down the Great River Road into Missouri.......I will tell that story tomorrow.