Today was a day I have been looking forward to since I was about 15 years old — the day that I actually got to see the Field of Dreams. We packed the car yet again for our travels, and we said our sad goodbyes to the Toney family The first stop was indeed the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, IA. The drive was about two and a half hours of excitement, except for the miles and miles and miles of corn.
As I am sure you guessed we were of course hungry well before we arrived in Dyersville, so we made a fun little stop for lunch in Dubuque, IA. This was not a planned stop, but we sure liked this little city, where Emily got to see the Mississippi River for the first time. We ate at a local restaurant called Blackwater Grill, also known as the Bricktown Brewery. The lunch was tasty and atmosphere was pretty cool as well. We spent about an hour running around Dubuque taking pictures and shopping and then continued our way to Dyersville!
We arrived in Dyersville and wound our way down the country roads, working our way back to what I would define as the true middle of nowhere. We drove up to the field just as you saw all the cars do at the end of the movie, a very surreal but cool feeling. We parked the car and, after I pulled Emily away from her natural biological desire to head for the only gift shop for 20 miles, we headed to the field. It is amazing how a baseball field in the middle of a corn field can give you such a happy feeling. We ran around together taking pictures of the house and the field and the corn. It was like we were in third grade. After acting like kids for about an hour and buying enough souvenirs to keep the Field in business for another 10 years, we said our goodbyes and headed to our final destination for the day, St. Louis, MO.
It was about a six hour drive to St. Louis, and we decided we needed to see more corn fields, so that is exactly what we did. We made our way towards St. Louis, but as the sun was setting we realized that we were very close to the capitol of Illinois, Springfield. As it was a race against the sunset we booked into downtown Springfield toward the capitol building. We got there just in time to capture a few good images just as we were running out of usable light.
After our fun adventure around the capitol building we decided we were hungry and wanted to eat dinner. For the first time, we decided to look up restaurants on the GPS system and go to one that sounded fun. For those of you thinking, “Oh, what a great idea!” you can think again. We found a restaurant in the GPS system called Jan and Dean’s Route 66 Cafe, which sounded fun to us. Well, as we made our way through the the darkest residential neighborhood, surrounded by not only a people cemetery but a pet cemetery as well, we realized that maybe the GPS was a little off on this location, or the restaurant simply no longer exists.
We decided to abandon that quest, and we went to a seafood restaurant that we saw on the way through town. The food was good, nothing to write home about, but it did the job of getting food in our stomachs.
After dinner we had another hour or so left of our trip to St. Louis. We pulled into our hotel around 11 pm and went right to sleep. We did not have the wireless internet that we were hoping for, but that did allow for some sleep. Another great day; we love being on the road!