Wednesday 5th August 2009 – North to Iowa

It only took three hours to get from Glasgow MO to Glasgow IA. Dulcie was determined to make me go and look at the Mississippi on the way, but I have become quite artful at distracting her with intermediate points to make her do it my way. She was obviously unaware that US 63 and US 34 had been significantly improved. At one point on 34, she refused to admit the road existed at all, and believed us to be spinning miles off-road in the middle of nowhere, shouting "recalculating, recalculating" over and over again. I have decided it's a mistranslation, and she is actually trying to say "repent".

..........It does illustrate, however, that the four hours of overnight brain surgery I indulged on her in Minneapolis did no good at all. But even if the poor old girl doesn't know where we are, and won't always choose a sensible route, she does let me see her map, so I know where we are.

Women! They insist you look at maps, then keep trying to tell you you're getting it wrong.

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Glasgow, Iowa, is now a sleepy crossroads hamlet of about eleven houses. But it used to be somewhere: it's supposed to be the first settlement in Jefferson County, two counties away from the Mississippi:

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While I was taking photos, a farmer came by and stopped to talk. He was, maybe, in his fifties. He said he could remember the gas station, the store, the doctor's house, and the telephone operator's house (you had to wake her (he said "her") to make a call out-of-hours). The town seems to have degenerated quite rapidly in the late fifties, early sixties. If this (untypical, but irresistible) example is anything to go by, it degenerated quite rapidly:

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..........Here we are looking down Unicorn Avenue into Glasgow, from the Glasgow Road (County Road 46). The roads are still signposted "First Street", "Second Street", and so on.

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..........Tomorrow, I shall see what the county library has to say about what it used to be like.

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Later that night, I made a foray into downtown Fairfield, the county seat. There appeared to be only one bar (Fairfield has a population of about 10,000, but is much influenced by the Maharishi University). The instant I stepped though the door, a man at the bar looked straight at me and said "come outside and fight me". The racial stereotyping lobe of my brain instantly identified him as Irish. Thickening my accent, as one does in these circumstances, I asked him if he knew what a Glasgow Kiss was, hoping his racial stereotyping lobe was up-to-date.

That little bit of male bonding having been taken care of, we fell into each other's arms. Well, he fell, I wasn't in falling mode till much later. He insisted on his friend buying me a drink.

He claimed to be German, not Irish. Actually, of course, he was American, but Americans have this strange need to have a nationality, as well as being American.

I let him get on with that while I updated and rebooted my racial stereotyping module. Actually it's a good job I got it wrong: if I'd got it right, I might have mentioned the war.