Travels WithJohn and Janice

Travel blog

Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.

Showing 3 of 236 posts

The Roseman covered bridge in Madison County, IowaUnited States
4 min read2019

Dateline August 3, 2019, Iowa, Looking Back at 2018

Coming back into Iowa stirred up a year of memories, so we finally told the 2018 stops the RV troubles had kept off the blog: the American Pickers store at LeClaire, the Hoover Library, the covered Bridges of Madison County, John Wayne's birthplace at Winterset, and the Amana Colonies, seven old German villages with a communal past and a refrigerator company in their future.

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Bridges, both plain and suspension, on the Cedar Rapids Country Club courseUnited States
3 min read2019

Dateline August 2, 2019, Cedar Rapids and Donald Ross

With Janice qualified, we drove to Cedar Rapids to get a look at the course that will host the USGA Senior Women's Amateur, and what a course: a 1915 Donald Ross design, restored to his original plans, with raised greens that shrug a ball off into the rough, wooden rakes and flagsticks, and suspension bridges over the streams. We found a county park nearby and booked it for tournament week.

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The view from Herbert Hoover's birthplace to his gravesiteUnited States
9 min read2018

Dateline July 12, 2018, Herbert Hoover

We have always loved the presidential libraries, and Herbert Hoover's, at his birthplace in West Branch, Iowa, asks a fair question: how did a brilliant humanitarian who fed millions come to be remembered as a failure? We set out to tell his whole story, the Quaker orphan who made a mining fortune, organized the rescue of starving Belgium and Russia, and then had the Great Depression land on his desk within months of taking office. It is a fuller and more generous picture than the schoolbooks give.

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