An Iowa Travelogue: Fields of Dreams

She’s flown over the ocean in a plane, seen the jungle when it’s wet with rain, taken a slow boat to China and put her camel to sleep. She has also cruised the Amazon and traveled and vacationed in 38 states. She is my treasured friend, Barbara Maple, and it is ridiculous to name the places she has been except to tell you that she has been to Paris 14 times. Of course, some of those Paris trips have been on the way somewhere else, like East Germany or Alsace. It’s easier to riffle the pages of the Almanac and say, “Barbara was there.”

Now, she has taken a trip which, she says, is probably her absolute favorite, although it is not comparable to Singapore or Israel, because it is Iowa.

She told me all about it over the weekend when I was sitting in her tall, gray-shingled house looking out over the Pacific to Catalina.

I am one of those people who would draw a map of the United States as consisting of two coastlines, and between these coasts is the middle, which holds the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon and the Rockies. I know nothing more about Iowa than I know of the moons of Uranus. I have never even known anyone from Iowa. Once I went to Chicago to make a speech and rode a cab to and from the airport. That was my trip to the Middle West. I know that makes me hopelessly parochial.

But now Barb has me convinced that Iowa is one of the most delightful places in the world, like visiting inside a portfolio of Norman Rockwell paintings, embellished with rich, nourishing food and towns full of people who have just won the Golden Hospitality Award.

Her mentor and the leader of the tour was a woman named Gwen Znerold who lives in Des Moines and takes groups of 35 people at a time to see the sights where the tall corn grows. She is an art and antiques appraiser, and speaks all over the United States on antiques, silver and glass.

One of the women on this trip was going to Iowa for Znerold’s tour for the third time. Barbara was going for the second time, and, for heaven’s sake, I want to go. There were also five men on this trip, all of them informed antique buffs.

Every person on the tour was from California and had heard Znerold speak here. She does one regular tour of California every winter.

The group was met by a four-piece brass band playing a Meredith Willson tune. They were introduced and entertained all around Des Moines.

They had a magnificent dinner at the governor’s mansion, which is known as Terrace Hill. They were the guests of Gov. Terry Bransdadt in the immense, gold-filigreed, Italian-Victorian house that Znerold had decorated with furnishings and bric-a-brac that she found for the house. One of the appetizers was cream cheese with sherry and chutney, smoothed on a crisp, sliced bagel.

They saw farm houses and city houses, fields of corn and rolling green hills, more green than Ireland, Barbara said. I think Barbara may have gone a bit too far with that Iowa hyperbole.

They visited Galena, a small town where the father of Ulysses S. Grant had a leather shop. When Grant had finished duty as commanding general of the Union Army in the Civil War, he returned to Galena where the grateful populace built him a large and spacious house. His wife, who was dear to him, had an eye problem that would have taken only minor surgery to repair. But Ulysses wouldn’t allow her to have it done. He said, “I couldn’t love her more than I do right now so I don’t want her to change anything.”

In Galena is the old DeSoto Hotel with its balcony where Grant made a speech.

In Des Moines, there are 30 blocks of skyway, which is a suspended glass passageway that connects office buildings, shops and restaurants so people can walk out of the rain, snow or heat.

Barbara even heard a great New Orleans jazz band concert and visited a Christmas shop where one tourist spent $500.

Of course I wish I had been along. Barbara is good fun as a traveling companion because she always sees something exciting and interesting to tuck in her memory.

Barbara had such a good time, she even invited the bus driver, Larry, and his wife and daughter, Laura, to visit her and her husband, Earl, at Balboa Peninsula.