Iowa Family Reunion

We left the house at 5:30AM to meet up with most of the family. Cathie and I don't have the best track record for showing up on time to these things. Last time we overslept by about two hours and due to my travel woes in New York, we were about five hours late arriving at Mackinac Island last week. My Dad had bet $5 with Dan and Jon that we would be on time, and my Dad won the bet. Dan and Kris were actually 11 minutes late.

Mid-way through the trip we pulled off the expressway into some random neighborhood to stop at a park. I asked Cathie why and her answer was, "Your family has a history of odd pit stops." It's true. In the past we stopped repeated in industrial parks and other strange places. We don't need no stinkin rest stop. We met up with Jon and Beth and got to see my new niece for the first time ever. My family seems to really love my Hulk Hogan 'stache. They express that love through repeatedly telling me just how bad it looks on me. Odd family, I know.

We had custom shirts printed for our family reunion to go along with the custom beer-coozies. In Iowa, when you go to a wedding, there are no fancy center pieces - just custom beer coozies. Nice, huh? In addition to the t-shirts, Dan ordered Cathie a custom thong with the family reunion logo printed on the front and back. My wife loves thongs, what can I say? I'm a lucky man.

We got to Dubuque around 3 to the hotel we're at, which is a very nice water park as well. Dubuque is right on the Mississippi - the 'ol Miss, the 'ol lady - and with that we get Mayflies. These things are huge and they are everywhere. They live for a day and die. They end up in piles three inches deep everywhere. Each one is about two inches long and can carry off a small child, or at least you would of thought so from the screaming the girls did. It turns out that my sister Sooze is AS scared of these flies as she is of sea-gulls.

We spent the day swimming and then my brothers and I headed out on a beer run. As is tradition, we got lost again. Even with our GPS systems. We did this last time every stinkin time we went out without my Dad.


The hotel we're at has an arcade, and while the boys competed in the air-hockey championship (Nate came in 2nd) and we ended up torturing Jon on this crazy machine.

Tomorrow morning we're heading to the field where Field of Dreams was filmed (probably even less exciting than it sounds) and then we're heading over to my Aunt's farm for the family reunion. We've got hay rides and even a bus to shuttle us around to all of the different stops at my cousins. My cousins love Busch Lite beer, which we learned last year is basically water and on a hot day you can drink about 20 of these things. We brought Bud to try and be the beer snobs in Iowa.