The Capital's Capitol is Capital

The Capital's Capitol is Capital, or to paraphrase, Lincoln's Capitol building is excellent.

We visited this Art Deco building Wednesday morning.

When Nebraska's previous capitol building started to deteriorate, they hired New York architects and artists to design a new building. The building was constructed over ten years, on a pay as you go philosophy. The building is full of symbolism, in the Art Deco style, including the sun and its energy, animals whose fossil records were found in Nebraska, and others too numerous to mention. Our guide was good and enthusiastic. Perhaps the most interesting story was the 1888 blizzard, in which a pleasant day changed to a desperate blizzard in an hour. One 15 year old teacher kept her children in their school until the storm ripped the roof off, when she tied a cord to each student and let them through the blizzard to a farmhouse. The image below is of the door to the unused legislative chamber, as Nebraska switched to a single body of the legislature (unicameral) after the building was completed.

After visiting the capitol, we hit the road. Our first stop was the Iowa visitor center, where we collected maps, brochures, and suggestions. Our next stop was to a Danish windmill, moved from Denmark to a Iowa village homesteaded by Danes. The scenery is rolling and beautiful.


We camped at Anita Lake State Park, another beautiful place.


On Thursday, we drove to Amana, Iowa, where we had a good lunch at the Ox Yoke restaurant, and Marianne visited the famous quilt store. Amana is part of the Amana Colonies, a religious settlement that was a collective until the 1930s, when they voted to separate the material from the religious. This was our 32nd wedding anniversary. We stopped for the night in Monicello, Iowa.