If you remember from last year, Heather and I had a whirlwind weekend over memorial day. The post picture also featured a sort of bridge. I am going to consider that a theme… more on that later.
This year we had surprisingly few plans for the weekend, with nothing going on Monday.
We were eager to take advantage of a free day, even if the weather wasn’t expected to be very nice. After tossing around a few ideas, we settled on Winterset IA, with the plan of viewing all six of their famed covered bridges.
I took some time before we left to load up my phone with map coordinates for each bridge, and a few geocaching locations around the area. Heather packed us a lunch, and we were all set for a little adventure!
Winterset is surprisingly close to where we live, so before we had even settled in for the drive we were in Madison County, and taking our first turn to seek out a bridge.
Two things worth noting at this point. One, the clouds had blown off, and it was starting to look like a beautiful day outside. Two, Heather and I have radically different ideas about what safe speeds on unpaved roads are. I won’t go into the subject in depth except to say I hope we set the high water mark for disagreements in 2011… and I think we gave it a good shot. I let Heather drive upon leaving the first bridge, leaving us with significantly more time to enjoy the Iowa countryside than we might have experienced under other circumstances.
To be honest, the fact that the bridges were out on desolate county roads came as a bit of a shock for me. It isn’t like I thought the bridges were an eighth wonder of the word or anything, but they seemed familiar enough that I was expecting more development. That isn’t to say that they weren’t being visited, they are just kind of out there.
We took a picture in front of each bridge, but they all kind of look alike… so we are going to take the quality over quantity approach and just have one bridge picture.
I tried looking for a few geocaches, but the bad weather that plagued the proceeding weekend made that unappealing at best. Spring rains, combined with the freshly tilled fields surrounding most of the bridges meant that finding a cache was going to involve tromping through some mud. Perhaps I am turning into a city person… but it just didn’t seem worth it. (Although the gravel-road speed question provides some strong evidence to the contrary)
After three bridges, we stopped in Winterset to hit a park and eat our lunch. The park is home to one of the bridges, and happens to be next to the cemetery (pictured at the top of this post). It was a touching sight, a hillside covered in flags gracefully blowing in the wind.
After lunch we only had two bridges left, so we plotted a route to catch them both, then point us home.
A few notes / highlights:
There is still one bridge you can drive over, and we did!
I suspect the trip would be more interesting if you did more research into the bridges beforehand, as there isn’t much on site.
The movie “Bridges of Madison County” does not count… and in the few minutes I lasted isn’t a great use of time.
There is a tower in the Winterset city park, I forget the name, but we skipped it, thinking it wasn’t worth walking down to… saw a picture later and I wish we would have taken the time to see it.
I think that about wraps up the trip! Perhaps not the most enthralling trip we have ever taken, but a wonderful way to get outside on a nice day and see something new!
-Jordan
Nelsons 