Getting Real With Shadra Bruce
Today we drove from Canistota, SD to Le Claire, IA. One way or another, we had to go South to get around the Great Lakes, but it was fun driving through Minnesota first, since my dad was there closing on his new house (he is nearing retirement and in anticipation bought a house on a lake with a private dock!)
We decided to stay in Le Claire, Iowa. It’s a perfect place to stop because it’s right on the Mississippi River. It’s beautiful, small, and gives us a good night’s rest before facing Chicago traffic. We are very familiar with the Comfort Inn in Le Claire because each time we’ve moved cross-country (only three times) we’ve stayed there. The hotel was a little more run down than the last time we’d been through, but still a nice place to spend a night when it’s just a stopover.
To our delight, we discovered a German restaurant just down the street from the hotel, Bier Stube. Delicious food (non-German fare for the picky kids) accompanied by real German import beer (Franziskaner Hefe-Weiss for me, Dunkel for Dave). Dave had the Jagerschnitzel and I had the Berliner Currywurst. Both were fabulously prepared and a real treat since we’d missed the German restaurants we’d discovered in Reno and Portland this round.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel and had our first clue that the kids were about at the end of their travel tolerance. They wanted our traditional family movie night, something we do at home each Sunday. So, we cooked up some popcorn, plugged the laptop into the TV (never travel without an HDMI cable these days – almost all of the hotels have modern TVs now), and watching Stuart Little (our goal with Sunday movies has been to introduce Anika and Parker to movies the older kids loved or that we enjoyed as kids). It was a perfectly relaxing night.