On our way home from the Badlands we wanted to make several stops. The first was a place called the Pink Poodle in Crescent, Iowa just outside of Omaha. The Pink Poodle serves some of the most massive (and good) slabs of corn feed beef to be found anywhere — no it isn’t a fancy steak house, just plain folks and plain food but huge steaks. Their piece de resistance is a 42 oz. prime rib that is free if you can eat it all! We stopped and gorged and no, we didn’t try the 42 oz. prime rib — we were hungry, not crazy.

Also, though we had not heard of the song, the book and then movie of “The Bridges of Madison County” we did know about the Covered Bridges so we took a look.

Our last stop was a Dutch settlement in Pella. While it was very pleasant, it was not very Dutch according to Esther (who is of Dutch extraction). There is, apparently a much better place — Holland, Michigan.

After Pella, we just burned for home, stopping overnight at La Salle Illinois to camp, burn the last of our firewood and prepare for the border crossing. This involved drinking a large amount of wine since we did not want to get dinged for the provincial extortion on liquor. We were hoping to sleep in but were woken up early in the morning by a large herd of cows in the next field whom, no doubt, were extracting revenge for us having kept them awake during our long night — we were the only ones camping in the site so we may have been a bit noisy ;-).