Finally

The final day of our road trip was our arrival in McGregor, which is not the town where my mom grew up, but is the town where I could find an Airbnb large enough for eight adults. Mary and Andy arrived at our Airbnb at the same time that Kelle and I did. I'm glad Kelle snapped this picture of me and Mary. It had been such a long time since I'd seen any of the kids, and for Mary it was the longest—since December 1, 2019. That's just too long. I'm so happy to have finally gotten our family together after this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year and a half. 

As luck would have it, Kelle rented a house for her family around the corner from ours. But her family didn't arrive until the day after we did, so after she settled in she walked down for dinner at our house. Only, we had been greeted with some typical Midwestern summer weather that evening—in other words, a storm. She didn't bring a raincoat but she came up with a workable substitute.

This was our group the first night. Brad's flight was delayed  and so was John and Troy's. Brad got in late that night but John and Troy were so late in arriving that they got a hotel room near the airport, which for them was about 90 minutes away.

I got to go on some good runs on the trip, and on the first morning Peter and Jessa were my running buddies. McGregor is located on the Mississippi River roughly across the water from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.  It's a little hazy but that's the Mississippi behind us.

On our first morning we drove the 25 minutes over to Elkader, which is the town my mom is from. In this picture we're having coffee, but earlier, before John and Troy arrived, we went on a mostly self-guided tour of the town. We visited the Carter House Museum, which has a lot of artifacts from the history of Elkader. We also met with a local woman who has started a cross-cultural organization between Elkader and the country of Algeria, since Elkader is the only place in the United States named after a Muslim person. (In the mid-1800s its founders named it for an Algerian resistance leader named Abd el-Kader.) She taught us a lot about the connection she's helped to foster with Algeria. If this topic interests you, there are multiple articles about Abd el-Kader and Elkader in this issue of Islamic Horizons. In addition, there's a fairly recent book about Abd el-Kader. 

Also on the tour was the apartment where my mom was raised. She was one of nine children, and her parents raised them in an apartment that you accessed through this black door. Up a flight of stairs was a large loft-like unit (as I remember it from when I was small). Her mom ran a curtain down the middle of the unit and the kids slept on mattresses on the floor. While we were there we talked to an old family friend and she said it was like a dormitory in there. With the exception of a couple of years when, because they fell on hard times (though it's tough to imagine how times could get harder than this) and moved in with my grandfather's parents, my mom's family lived in this apartment continuously until my grandparents died in the early 1960s.

Since there are only a couple of restaurants in downtown Elkader, it didn't take much thinking to stay with our Algerian theme and meet up at Shera's, as it also has a terrific beer selection. John and Troy met up with us and we had a wonderful lunch overlooking Elkader's Turkey River. Troy could not believe the beer that was on offer, and she found a rare beer that she and John had been wanting to try. In other words, Shera's did not disappoint.

Afterwards, we all got our picture taken by the Keystone Bridge, which is without a doubt the most iconic landmark in Elkader. My mom had multiple pictures and paintings of the bridge hanging in her house. Here's the lowdown on it: at 346 feet long it's the longest keystone bridge west of the Mississippi. It took nine months to build in 1889 at a cost of just over $16,000. And it's made from locally quarried limestone. There, now you're an expert on Elkader's keystone bridge!

I just realized I haven't yet shown you a picture of the house we rented. Isn't it adorable? It was perfect for us as it had four bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. The firepit out back was the perfect gathering place for evening bonfires. And speaking of evening bonfires .....

Yes, we enjoyed sitting around the fire at night. And I enjoyed watching my children all try to show off their fire-building skills. They are actually rather good at it. We had a nice fire every night and better yet, a good time sitting around it and talking.