Iowa: Clarinda and Red Oak

This weekend I took a short road trip with the G family over to Clarinda, IA. Clarinda is a small town where their claim to fame is that Glenn Miller was born there back in 1904. It's also where my Grandfather was born in 1917, into a good, Scots-Presbyterian family. Every spring Clarinda has a Glenn Miller Festival where the best Big Bands come and play. There's also a Glenn Miller museum, which costs $6 per person, so we skipped it.

The Nodaway Museum on the edge of Clarinda is really neat. Besides several rather decrepit outbuildings, it's two big museum buildings put together, and a basement besides, just full of Prairie history. There's a quilt room with racks of impressive antique quilts, and a genealogy center. Donations are requested, but there is no set entrance fee. The museum is staffed by elderly volunteers, who were so friendly that we could hardly leave!

It was sunny, 91F and amazingly humid, so our trip largely ended up being us sitting in the air-conditioned car, looking at the various small towns out the window. We spent a fair amount of time in the extremely agricultural and obscure town of Red Oak. Who knew that Red Oak, IA had so many amazing houses? We drove through street block after street block of gorgeous late-Victorian mansions. The Gs, always on the lookout for morbid haunted houses, loved it.