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This is a multi part blog, to make it easier to read...
Monday, we headed to Clear Lake, Iowa, to visit the Surf Ballroom - the last place Buddy Holly and the Crickets, J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and Ritchie Valenz ever played. The Surf was kinda cool - the dressing room had the signatures of bands that played there - the sigs were on the walls, the sink, the doors, the ceiling... We danced on the floor to the music they were playing - retro vinyl stuff from the late 70's early 80's, mostly. There were pictures of performers on the walls from Guy Lombardo to Lynyrd Skynrd's Ronnie Van Zandt to Buddy Holly to Waylon Jennings... almost anyone famous who played the Surf Ballroom. It seemed to have a lot of history besides the "Day the Music Died" - it was cool! And the seats and dance floor and everything - it is pretty much the same as from the 50's and 60's.
Also in Clear Lake is the Buddy Holly Memorial - it is a HUGE pair of glasses like Holly's at one end of the dirt road that runs right along the crash site - now overgrown with soya plants. After all - the plane DID crash into a farm field. And the family who owned it then, I believe, STILL owns it and has to make a living... But you can drive along the dirt road - I recommend this; it's looooooong - to about halfway, look south and about the length of an American football field away is the crash site. I kept hearing "American Pie" running through my head... alternating with The Saga Begins...
Next we headed to Austin, Minnesota, home of Hormel, to see the Spam museum. Yep, Hormel made a museum dedicated to their spiced canned ham product! With a gifty shoppy! :D That was kinda cool - it showed the beginnings, the troubles, the Monty Python skit, all the things Hormel did during World War I and II to support our troops, what the plant workers wear, where else in the world Hormel cans Spam... Anything you ever wanted to know about Spam but were to bothered with important stuff - like work and bills - to ask. Spam, spam, spam, spam...
And on the way back home, we stopped in Anamosa, Iowa to see a supposedly haunted prison and its graveyard. The architecture was cool! But it was closed - no tours - and so was its graveyard. Once again, the weather - which the Weather Channel said was SUPPOSED to be clear until late that evening - turned really ugly. And once again we were in Julie's car. And once again, my poor friend was about to s**t kittens because it was SO bad! And the sky was SO strange looking - there was a very narrow but loooong strip of sunlight amidst so many clouds and so much rain! She got a bit confused and took the wrong road, and that made it that much worse - if she hadn't taken that wrong turn (at Albuquerque?) we probably would have missed the worst of it. So much for HER knowing where we were going... :P
Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!
