So many places to see, so little time….

Initially, my outline had me staying in Davenport, IA overnight. I didn’t make it that far, so I still had to get through all of Illinois this morning.

I drove pretty much right across the state only stopping in the rest areas. I made it to Moline, IL, where I had a virtual cache at the John Deere Pavilion on my list to find. I wish the store there had been open. The kids’ toy trucks inside looked really interesting.

Across the river in Davenport, I found one of the few remaining webcam geocaches around. The idea here is to get a picture of yourself from a webcam to qualify as “finding” the geocache.

The next stop was in West Branch, IA. I didn’t know when I planned it out that it was the hometown of President Hoover. I just knew I had seen a few interesting geocaches there.

Unfortunately, most of the interesting places around town were closed either due to the pandemic or construction that was going on. Time was tight anyway and I had two places I wanted to get to today if I could. Fortunately, it was still morning since I’d gotten my start at 6 in the morning.

Riverside, Iowa was my #1 destination for the day. With the blessing of Gene Roddenberry and Paramount, it has been declared the “future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.”

There’s a bronze statue of the man in a park in town. It’s not supposed to look too much like either of the actors who have portrayed James T. Kirk, but I think it looks like a young William Shatner.

Across the street from the statue is a Trek museum. It’s free to enter. Every year the city hosts Trekfest. The model of the Starship Riverside outside of the museum is one of their parade floats. They have other things that have come off of floats inside the museum, as well as some nice pieces.

I followed a great multi-geocache around town too. This is a geocache where you start at one place and gather clues to the next location. Some multi-caches are two steps, some are many, many more. This was a fairly easy 3-part multi-cache. The hardest part was finding parking and walking to the final location.

I checked the time when I was finished in Riverside and wondered if I could make it to my next destination. If I skipped any other geocaches on my list and just drove to the second major destination for this day, I could make it before it closed.

I really wanted to visit the original Field of Dreams outside of Dyersville, IA. I got there at 4:30 and they close up at 6PM. They stop doing house tours at 4PM. I was okay with that since I wasn’t interested in seeing the inside of the house.

I sat for a while on the bleachers just enjoying the view. The corn hasn’t grown yet, so it doesn’t look like it does in the film. Still, it was very peaceful to be here.

There were two geocaches here. One is a trivia cache that I did the legwork on at home, so I had the right coordinates. The second was a small one right by the entrance sign. I also talked with the girl at the entrance booth about geocaching. She didn’t know about it and after talking a bit she said she was interested in doing it!

I also spent entirely too much money in the gift shop here. But hey, it’s baseball!

It was late in the day at this point, and it had been my longest day so far. Still, I accomplished way more than I thought I would when I started out that morning. I was sure I would be staying overnight in Dubuque and going to Field of Dreams in the morning. Instead, I headed to Waterloo, IA, and prepared for the next day.