Zuke and Melissa: Midwest Trip Day 7: Nauvoo, Iowa, & Nebraska

We left Nauvoo the morning of June the 6th, but before we could leave, we had to send Zuke and Alexander dumpster diving. (This is probably one of my favorite stories of the entire trip!) Annalee and I had been packing up our treats and food that morning and putting them in bags on the counter. Well, apparently when the guys were taking out all of the trash, they grabbed all of our snacks and threw them out with the trash. We didn't notice until we had stopped at the gas station, and despite the protests from Zuke and Alexander, we drove back to the villas to inspect the trash bin for our treats. Sure enough, they were there, still all protected in the plastic bags. I really wish we would have taken a picture of the two of them searching through the dumpster!

Once we recovered our treats, we headed down to the Nauvoo Temple to take some pictures, since the sun was finally out. Once we got all the pictures we wanted, we hit the road. While driving through Keokuk, we started noticing all of these old cars driving past us on the other side of the road. This continued for the next 60 miles or so, and we found out that we were passing by some big classic cars road rally. We saw some really awesome cars, which kept us pretty entertained while driving along the boring plains of Iowa. Zuke had been wanting to drive through Leon, IA, where he was born, and Lamoni, IA, where he lived with his parents when he was little. We took a little tour of the town, which didn't take very long since it's so small, and tried to go have lunch at a pizza place that Zuke had been raving about. Unfortunately, it was closed, so we had to settle for pizza hut. On our way out of town, we stopped at an Amish store right by the freeway. The only thing that was really impressive about it was the cows and the wooden swings out front.

Later that night, we drove into Nebraska and decided to go check out Winter Quarters in Omaha. The temple was fenced off, so we just had to settle for pictures of it from across the street. We got to take a tour through the visitor's center, which was really fun. Tyler was actually quite interested in hearing all of the pioneer stories that they were telling. After that, while I was loading the kids into the car, the other 3 adults walked across the street to check out the pioneer cemetery really quickly. Hearing all of those pioneer stories over those few days really gave us all a deeper appreciation of the sacrifices that our pioneer ancestors made for us. After leaving Winter Quarters, we quickly found a motel and crashed for the night, just as the storm rolled in.