Part of the reason for my unplanned blogging vacation was that the end of the summer has been busy — and a lot of fun. I decided to do a giant roundup of some of the stuff I’ve been up to. Not too many food photos, but a few for good measure.
We had a great day at the Maha Music Festival. It was the first year we’d attended — all the other years we’d been out of town. Lots of good music and man, what great weather. I didn’t take a photo of it, but my favorite food-related thing of the day was a delicious cocktail the on-site bartenders were making called a Black Eyed Susan.
Josh Rouse
The Mynabirds
A very blurry photo of Shirley Manson of Garbage, who put on a pretty awesome show.
Two of our college friends, Derek and Jill, got engaged earlier this summer in Des Moines, and Derek threw a surprise engagement party for his now fiancee (she said yes!) so we drove down for the event. We decided to detour through some small towns in Iowa and stopped for lunch at a place called the Family Table in Atlantic.
These onion rings were pretty tasty. I had a BLT and Matthew had a pork tenderloin.
Outside I had to take a photo of this super old Omaha World-Herald sign.
We walked past a Des Moines art center sculpture garden downtown and I loved this sculpture, by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa.
Last weekend, my sister and I went to Jefferson City, Missouri, to tour their “haunted” state penitentiary. My sister works for a travel magazine and she’s doing a story about the tours. The state pen was definitely scary, though we weren’t sure how haunted it was. Definitely not as scary as the visit we made, for another one of her stories, to the Villisca Ax Murder house in Villisca, Iowa. I get scared just thinking about that place.
Boxer Sonny Liston was a prisoner at the state pen. You can see inside what was his cell.
The day after our creepy night tour we tooled around the city. The highlights: a stop at the Yellow Moon antique store, where I got that big ring, and ice cream at the Central Dairy. The pralines and cream I had was top-notch.
One of the best things about living in a house in the summertime is a deck. We’ve been using ours a lot.
