We started our day in our quaint HGTV motor court with waffles and coffee. The breakfast area was a cute as the rest of motel.

We decided to take the surries out for a spin before we left. These two were definitely not going at a leisurely pace… more like nascar in the parking lot!

One more time, we loaded our Mom’s Cafe boxes and cooler and hit the road. We are crossing Iowa today with a couple a fun stops… although when we mapped out seeing everything we wanted to see, the drive was going to be 9+ hours, so we picked a few that were streamlined and hit the road.

Iowa is the number producer of corn in the United States, and I think we can say we saw a lot of it today. Here’s a few Iowa corn facts we learned: 99% of the corn grown in Iowa is field corn (not the sweet corn we all like to eat); there is one silk for every kernel that grows in an ear of corn; and the number of kernels per ear varies from 500 to 1,200, but a typical ear has 800 kernels in 16 rows.

There was corn rolling on every field… it really was peaceful to just see the rows planted in a line. We decided to stop and have lunch somewhere to stretch our legs and thankfully found the Grundy County Park.

The park was beautiful and hosted a pop-up Mom’s Cafe. The boys threw the football while I got lunch ready and we were all thankful to not be moving for a minute. This vacation has been fun but we have covered a lot of territory with a lot of driving.

We left the park and headed towards Brandon, Iowa, home of Iowa’s largest Frying Pan! It’s built to scale and could cook 528 eggs at the same time. (It was the world’s largest frying pan at 14 feet tall and 9 feet wide until Long Beach, Washington created one that was 9 1/2 feet wide). Either way, it was worth a 20 minute diversion, and some great pictures 😁

I always think of 2 things when I see this much corn… Children of the Corn (probably would have had a heart attack if I heard someone whisper “Malachi”) and Field of Dreams. I think I said “if you build it, they will come” at least 10 times today 😁 Might as well answer the call… since they built it, we went 🤪 (awesome Mom joke)

Fields of Dreams was really fun to see. Full disclosure, we aren’t a huge baseball family. But still cool to see where they filmed the movie and all the folks there, especially the little boys playing baseball on the field.

But, this was by far my favorite… this older couple played catch in the outfield. Just back and forth to each other the whole time we were there. It was the sweetest thing to watch. I’m not sure they knew anyone else was even there ♥️ #marriagegoals

Glad we stopped to make a few memories.

We grabbed dinner at Jenny’s Diner (and almost froze with the A/C! Seriously, I think the temperature was set to “meat locker” brrrr!) But we did get a beautiful picture of the sun setting behind the courthouse.

Tomorrow, we head to Chicago and our last full day of vacation.