Road trippin' to Iowa!

740 miles
12 hours
5 kilometers
4 people
1 winery
1 brewery
1 corn maze
1 round of frisbee golf
1 observation tower
LOTS of pics and LOTS of laughs!

That about sums up a long weekend trip to Iowa!

Danielle (my cousin), Mike and I road-tripped to Oksaloosa, IA to visit my cousin's fiancé (Blaine) and to accept a challenge to run a 5k last weekend.

[back story: First off, Mike and I have been training for this 5k for months, it seems. We are NOT runners. Even though we've both been dropping pounds and working out, we're not distance runners, so we both had to train for this. Having this race looming on the calendar has kept me motivated to stay on my diet and work out as much as possible. When Blaine challenged us to run a 5k, I timidly accepted. And, now it's history.]

We left at noon on Friday and headed south on I35. Six hours later after driving through miles and miles and miles of cornfields and wind farms, we arrived at Blaine's house.

Bright and early Saturday morning we were dressed and headed to Eddyville (about 15 minutes away) to run the Cargill Ghoul Gallop. Did I mention that it was a Halloween fun run? Yep, it was. So, we dressed up in costumes.

Mike left me in the dust within the first 2 blocks. I stayed with Danielle and Blaine for the next block and then decided to do my best and run the race. I ran by myself most of the time, and that's a challenge for me. I'm not good at keeping a slow, steady pace. I like to think I can run faster and get it over with. I ended up walking three times because I couldn't keep my pace up.

In the end, I finished 33:45, Mike was 28:19 and Blaine and Danielle followed me. It was a hard 3.1 miles having to run into the strong NW wind along a dike on the river on a grassy path for about 1 mile. But, we finished!

After the race we cleaned up and then headed out to visit a huge winery with 100,000 vines. How cool is that!??! It was gorgeous! We got lost in a corn maze, drank some luscious libations at a brewery, shopped in Pella, IA, ate some de-lish Chinese food and then went back to Blaine's house and crashed on the couch to watch a movie.

Sunday morning we headed out to play a round of frisbee golf. (I'm better than Mike, btw!) We also climbed a 104' observation tower that overlooks one of Iowa's only lakes. hehe! True! It's man-made and used to be a mine. It's huge and very pretty. By the time we ate our picnic lunch and climbed the tower it was early afternoon and time for us to head north.

We packed a lot into our short weekend. It was great and I'm looking forward to our next 5k and trip to visit Blaine. Bring it on!