The next day, the four of us took our second day trip. This time, we went to Des Moines, Iowa. Shelby and I had never been at all. I could probably make every fifth word of this post "crops," because there was literally that much corn to see, but I'll just get it out of my system now. Crops, corn, so much corn. Okay, there. Everyone who we talked to told us that there was nothing to do there, and that we were wasting our time, but it was honestly my favorite part of our entire trip.
Our first stop was lunch. I had looked up some cool attractions that Des Moines has to offer, and something that really caught my eye was a restaurant called Zombie Burger. So, we checked it out. It was so good. The entire place is decorated with a walking dead theme. The menu was really awesome. The sandwiches were mostly inspired by lines from movies, and it was just really neat how different some of the ingredients were. My sandwich was called The Walking Ched, and it included: breaded + deep fried macaroni + cheese bun, Cheddar cheese, caramelized + raw onion, macaroni + cheese, mayo, chicken breast. It was incredible. You can't possibly imagine this food until you see it for yourself.
After, we checked out the rest of the East Village. The first shop we went into, the owner was really cool. She sold me this awesome Kind granola. I am forever grateful for that, especially because there is no tax on food in Iowa. She gave us a map, and showed us the places we had to see in the area. We shopped for a couple of hours. The capitol is beautiful, and there were a couple of really neat local shops. It was fun. Because of the granola-seller's recommendation, we next went to the Sculpture Garden. It was basically just a big grassy area with abstract sculptures inside. It was a hot day, so we gave nearly all of our attention to one. It was a huge person sitting, kind of, made entirely of big white letters. There were so many letters, and it was just really good. To cool down, we walked over to Ritual Cafe, which is a coffeehouse. I had tea.
We then started the drive back toward Kansas City. We had one more stop: Indianola. It's just south of Des Moines, and there is essentially nothing there. Unless you go the week that we went. This week was special, because of the 2012 Balloon Classic. The hot day was finally cooling off. We parked in a field along with the rest of Indianola and walked to an open area where the spectators waited. We grabbed some lemonade, put down our blanket, and managed to all sit on it. There was a cover band, Past Vertical, who played the alternative jams of our childhood. One of those songs was "All the Same Things," and I'm not joking when I say that I experienced all of the negative emotions I had during those three minutes. I was angry, upset, disappointed, sad, and generally displeased. It was bad enough that I feel the need to document it. That's my favorite band, and the cover was just dreadful.
Within an hour, the first hot air balloon was in the sky. Balloons are amazing things. They're massive. But they barely weigh anything. And they're so colorful. It felt like everything was aligning. We had a nice day, followed by a great evening. After all of this balloon watching, we were quite hungry. The goal was to get something local from Indianola, but our phones were kind of failing us. We finally just went to the grocery store, hoping to find some kind of food. Instead, we found a pleasant woman in the cereal aisle. So, I asked her where we should eat. She gave me a couple of suggestions, but seemed not to be as familiar as we would have liked. Suddenly, like vultures, the eavesdropping Indianolans were on us. "WINN'S," they said. "YOU GOTTA GO TO WINN'S." I may be exaggerating a little, but we were natives, and there were at least four of them suggesting we go to this Winn's. The online menu was really interesting. They had pizza, steak, egg rolls, gyros, pork chops, etcetera. We finally found Winn's; it was closed. Extremely frustrated, we went to Taco Bell.
states: 03/50
Bryce :)
