American Discovery Trail: Iowa City, Iowa

Iowa City, Iowa

This week, we are close to Iowa City, Iowa, a town of 74,828 according to the Internet, and the fifth-largest town in Iowa. We are just over 50 miles into the state. From here, it is a straight shot west to Des Moines, but we will not go that way, instead heading north and then back south to get there, passing the most northern point of the American Discovery Trail on the way.

The Iowa trail is divided into six segments, and this first one, ending in Cedar Rapids, is 97 miles long, so I will still be working on segment one this time next week.

I have walked 1,645 miles so far, over 3.6 million steps. I started counting my steps every day rather than trying to filter out days that I was, for example, playing bridge all day, and as a result my steps per day have suffered, but keeping track is just more straightforward if I count them all.

I find myself feeling a bit more tired on my walks these days, sometimes even skipping an evening walk because I just do not feel like it. Maybe something is wrong and slowly dragging me down, maybe I am not sleeping well enough, maybe I am just getting older, but it seems like more of an effort than it was just a few years ago. I suppose that as I get older, I will have to push just a little harder to cover the same distances. For sure, bridge has changed things for now, as my primary focus is now pursuing bridge goals rather than walking goals, though most days I have time for both.

Loess Hills overlook in western Iowa, a bit north of where we will walk as we approach Nebraska.

The Lewis and Clark interpretive center at Sioux City Iowa. This site is also on the western edge of Iowa, also north of where we will walk and not far from Loess Hills. In my quest to visit all 50 states, I want to have one place that I can say I went to in each state. For Iowa, this is the place. We took the boys there in about 2003 on a long vacation that followed the Lewis and Clark expedition route backward, starting at the Washington Coast. Lewis and Clark followed the Missouri River for most of their trek, and at Sioux City, the river marks the boundary between Iowa and Nebraska.