![[bicyclist near Chippewa Falls, WI]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/biker_chippewa.jpg)
![[The Mississippi Queen in La Crosse, WI]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/mississippi_queen.jpg)
![[web site logo]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/title_and_tag.jpg)
In Clear Lake, the spirit of the 1950s didn't die with Buddy Holly.
This northern Iowa lake town, midway between the Twin Cities and Des Moines, swells with vacationers in summer but retains the laid-back, carefree air of decades past.
On the shores of the lake, classic cars cruise around pocket-sized City Park, fuzzy pink dice dangling from mirrors. Every Saturday and Sunday, the municipal band plays in the bandshell. The Lions Club grills chicken and sweet corn, and a paddlewheeler takes tourists on cruises.
Even in a region rich in ethnicity, the Dutch stand out.
In a town square in Iowa, lacy white hats shaped like pyramids, horns and half-moons bob high atop women's heads. Men wear black caps, breeches or baggy trousers and narrow bands cross at their throats. Their wooden shoes click and clack as they dance.
"These are the weirdest people I've ever seen!'' shrieked a little boy watching from the sidelines.
Of all the immigrant groups, Norwegians perhaps are most sentimental.
They settled in hills and valleys reminiscent of their homeland, bringing trunks full of handcrafted ale bowls and mangle boards. Generations later, they’re still painting bowls and stitching costumes in the old style and celebrating holidays with foods poor Norwegians ate in the 19th century.
The heart of this nostalgia is Decorah, a town of 8,500 tucked into the wooded ridges and limestone bluffs of northeast Iowa. It's the home of Luther College, established by Norwegians in 1861, and Vesterheim, founded in 1877 and now the nation's most comprehensive museum dedicated to a single ethnic group.
For much of its existence, Dubuque, Iowa, has been a little short on charisma.
It started out well, with a lead-mining boom and eight breweries and Victorian mansions filled with millionaires.
But it faded into obscurity. Its last brewery sits empty next to the 1856 Shot Tower, where laborers once turned molten lead into bullets and cannonballs by dropping it through screens into cool river water.
Poor Herbert Hoover.
Orphaned at age 9, he spent his childhood picking potato bugs, weeding onions and cleaning barns. His first job after graduation from Stanford was shoveling ore.
Then he grew a moustache, bought a tweed suit and passed himself off as an experienced mining engineer. Sent to Australia at
age 23, he found a vein of gold that yielded his London employers $65 million.
First, an elf sashayed down the street.
Behind him marched adults in bunads, the traditional Norwegian folk costume, and two shaggy little boys wearing the long noses, beards and tails of trolls.
Baton twirlers, roller-limbo skaters, polka dancers, folk dancers, fiddlers, buglers and queens of all kinds followed, lobbing torrents of Tootsie Rolls and hard candy to the crowd along the route. My children thought it was the best parade they'd ever seen.
Over the years, the byways around McGregor, Iowa, have seen an extraordinary procession of people.
Between 650 and 1300, Woodland Indians built animal-shaped burial mounds, 29 of which are preserved nearby at Effigy Mounds National Monument.
In 1673, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet arrived via the Wisconsin River, claiming the land for France and paving the way for the fur trade, whose center was just across the river in Prairie du Chien.
In 1997, a small-town damsel who married a prince — well, an heir — waved a silver wand over her hometown of Perry, Iowa, and unusual things began to happen.
She took the Hotel Pattee, a dowdy brick building on the brink of demolition, and
filled it with terra-cotta tile, Persian rugs and so much Honduran mahogany she cornered the market for it. Artists moved in
and painted murals and whimsical folk-art lamps, bedsteads and armoires.
Decorators went to work on the Arts and Crafts lobby and library, a railroad dining-car restaurant and 40 theme rooms and suites that honor everyone from Louis Armstrong to the creator of the "Alley Oop’’ comic strip.
Long before the second-growth forests of Minnesota and Wisconsin’s north woods became fall destinations, sightseers were flocking to northeast Iowa.
Flat? Hardly. In this part of Iowa, only the river is flat. Towering bluffs line the Mississippi, providing unparalleled views of the sprawling river plain.
For more than 150 years, people have gone to great lengths to see these views. In 1851, when the town of Lansing consisted of a few log cabins, a 20-year-old steamboat passenger named Harriet Hosmer noticed a particularly steep bluff there. She asked the captain, who had stopped to take on wood, if she had time to climb it and, when he sent a clerk to escort her, easily beat him in a race to the bluff top. The peak has been called Mount Hosmer ever since.
In summer, the nomads are on the move.
These days, their dwellings might look the same whether they’re herding yaks on the steppes of Kyrgyzstan or exploring tidepools along the Oregon coast. The round, cloth-sided hut called a yurt — or ger, in Mongolia — originated in Central Asia but now can be found in state parks across North America.
Oregon provided the first yurts for its campers in 1994 — “No tent? No RV? No problem. We’ve got you covered’’ — and now offers them in 18 state parks, mostly along its famous coast. Then Washington state built some yurts, and Idaho and Colorado, and now yurts can be found in two dozen state and provincial parks across the continent, even in Texas and Georgia.
There's something inspiring about a certain pocket of northeast Iowa.
It's nurtured a a beloved children's-book author, a famous composer and two brilliant woodcarvers. It's stirred battalions of people who create art, preserve heirloom seed and carry on Norwegian culture.
There are a lot of stories in these hills and valleys on the edge of the Driftless Area, which escaped the flattening effects of the glaciers.