To say the past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind would be an understatement. I knew things were going to be crazy making the drive out to Denver Colorado, but I really had no idea just how exhausting it all would be. I think we could have made the drive in two days, but we decided to extend it to three just to make it a little easier on ourselves.
This Ford Explorer was our trusty ride through the majority of the trip. I rented it from the local Avis location and while it was a decent car, it was quite obvious someone had smoked in it previously. That made the ride a bit uncomfortable at times, but ultimately manageable.
We ended up putting close to 3500 miles on this thing, that's something like 5300 Kilometers over thirteen days. We averaged about 25 miles per gallon, and we get to add five new states to the map @mrsbozz and I got for Christmas of states we have visited together.
States that we have simply had a layover in while flying don't count. We have to have actually made a stop somewhere in the state, or driven the full length for it to make it onto the map. After getting out of Michigan and driving across Indiana and Illinois, we had our first stop in Davenport Iowa.
I'll write a little more about Davenport tomorrow, today I want to specifically cover Vander Veer Botanical Park. As I said, we wanted to visit at least one interesting thing in each state, so this park was our choice in Iowa.
The park sits in the middle of downtown between two one way streets about a half mile or so away from the Mississippi River.
It was a pleasant afternoon when we rolled into Davenport to check out the botanical garden. We found a number of people just sitting in their cars around the parking lot watching the ducks and geese at the small pond on the property. There was also a large number of kids playing on the playground. I am guessing there was either a special party happening, or the garden runs some kind of summer camp for kids.
There is a welcome/education center on site, but we didn't go inside. Quite honestly, after riding in a car for seven hours, we were happy to just enjoy the fresh air and sunshine!
They had a couple small garden areas near the front of the park, but we seemed to have arrived at a bad time as the grounds keepers were working around the flowers and we didn't want to get in their way. They also had a pretty vast hosta garden area.
The rose garden was pretty cool, but as I said, you can see the workers in their trucks in the background waiting for us to get out of the way.
We made our way past the individual gardens and over to the tree lined path that you saw in the opening photo. We made sure to stop and take a selfie too so that we could remember our time in Davenport fondly.
In my experience, most tree lined paths lead to something quite special, and this one didn't disappoint. If you follow the path back towards the downtown area of Davenport, you end up at this fountain. We must have picked a bad day to visit because they were working on the fountain. It kept shutting off randomly, but I was able to grab a couple photos of the water running.
What actually impressed me more than the fountain were the flowers that they had planted in the area around it. They were so colorful and vibrant. I've never seen anything like them before. Lucky for you, I grabbed a few shots!
I don't know what those yellow flowers are called, but they were pretty freaking awesome. The combination of the pink, purple, and yellow went really well together.
We continued on past the fountain and looped back towards the small pond. As we started back, I noticed this old tree that was growing on one of the hillsides. I couldn't tell if it had fallen or if that was just the way it had grown, but the branches were basically touching the ground.
We continued past and came upon this small bridge in the middle of the field. It didn't really run over water or anything, it seemed to be a bit more decorative than anything else. It made me wonder how many people have had special occasion photos taken around or on this bridge. Like senior photos, weddings, engagements, etc.
While admittedly random, it was still a cool feature and we made sure to snap some shots of it.
As we were continuing on, I noticed a stump sticking out of the ground. It was pretty clear that a very large tree had once stood there. I didn't feel like the first picture gave a good impression of just how big it was, so I stood on the stump and took the second one for good measure!
As I said, we worked our way back to the duck pond before we got back into the car and headed back to our hotel. You might notice in the photo above that there is a floating island in the middle of the pond. As you can see from the other photo, that island was installed in 2017 and works to improve the water quality in the lagoon.
It's a pretty cool concept, but it looks like they need to add a few more of them to finish the job!
Given more time, there are probably other places we should have visited in Davenport besides Vander Veer Botanical Park, but I wasn't sure how easy it was to get to Rock Island Arsenal, and as I said, we mostly just wanted to stretch our legs in the outdoors.
That's why I am including this as a #wednesdaywalk post sponsored by @tattoodjay. Looking at the map, there are actually a couple botanical parks in the "Quad City" (Davenport, Moline, Rock Island, and Bettendorf) area of Iowa, so if you are into that sort of thing, you should check it out!
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