Another Week, Another Posting

Geez, I have been bad about posting new entries lately- at least now it is bad because we have been really busy instead of not doing anything. My parents arrived on Wednesday evening last week and we've been touring around with them. I was able to leave work at noon on Thursday so I took them to the Reiman Gardens. They know so much about plants and flowers and what everything was so it was great to go there again with them and learn a little more.





We visited the butterfly building where there were a lot of butterflies- around 800 to 1,000 they told us. There were so many different ones and they were beautiful. In the first picture below, I pointed this out to my mom and said, "Look how this one's wings come away from its body in the middle. That's really unusual and looks cool!" My mom laughed and laughed at me and then clued me into the fact that maybe that wasn't just one butterfly but rather two of them getting their butterfly love on. It's fairly obvious in the picture but I couldn't tell when I first saw them. Oops!





Friday wasn't too exciting. I left work at noon like I usually do on Fridays and we went to Target and I drove them around town for a little tour. We also dropped off a bill at city hall. Wow. But yesterday was really a LOT of fun. We all went to the Madison County Bridge Festival and ate our way around Winterset, Iowa. We also took the bus tour that the Rotary Club was doing to 4 of the 6 remaining covered bridges. It was a beautiful drive around Madison County although the 2 hour tour was much longer than I was expecting. It seemed to go by really fast though and it was very enjoyable.





Winterset is also the home of Marion Robert Morrison, more commonly known as John Wayne. They have a museum there in the house he grew up in which would have been pretty cool to see but it was already getting late in the day and we were wanting to leave. It was dinnertime when we left there so we drove home and stopped on the way at the Outback Steakhouse (or the Outhouse Steakback as I have been known to accidentally call it). I had some chicken that was good but the best part was the baked sweet potato with butter and cinnamon on it. YUM-MY! I even have leftovers to look forward to today. In fact, that is probably our biggest excitement today. We were going to go on a cruise of the Mississippi River but it is raining quite a lot and it's supposed to be like that all day. We decided it was better to just stay home and relax today. I've got some more things planned before they leave and it's really nice just to spend some time together, not doing much.