Dubuque is the only major town in Iowa's portion of the Driftless Area, a portion of the upper Mississippi Valley that escaped glaciation during the most recent ice ages. The glaciers had a tremendous dullifying effect on Iowa's topography, planing off the tops of hills and filling valleys with gravel and ground-up rock, resulting in the monotonous rolling hills that predominate much of the state today. But in the northeastern corner of the state, the Mississippi was left free to cut its valley into the bedrock, resulting in unusually steep topography, unique microclimates, and the oldest rocks in the state. In addition to the lure of hills! and rocks! was the pull of Iowa's only National Park unit, Effigy Mounds National Monument, and the reputation (around here, anyway) that the northeastern portion of the state has for good fall leaf color.
So we headed off for a three-day weekend, and arrived in Dubuque a little before sunset. We had a little bit of difficulty finding our lodgings, because the Google Map directions we printed out were a monstrous pack of lies as far as the actual street location of our motel was concerned – the directions spun a tall tale of streets that did not exist, or travel against the traffic on one-way streets, that sort of thing. But we overcame the map in the end, and wandered over to the city's spiffy new waterfront promenade to watch the barges go by.
The promenade was pretty and nicely designed and all that, but it has one big problem; there's nothing to do there. It's a beautifully crafted brick walkway along the top of the levee, but it starts nowhere and goes nowhere. Well, it kinda sorta starts near the parking lot of the local casino (insert Sideshow Bob-like exclamation of defeated disgust here), then runs under the prow of the town convention center, then sputters out behind a defunct brewery that's trying to make a comeback as a tasting room for a local winery. But we had assumed that there would be a multitude of restaurants, bars, life. There was only one, and at that one a live band was doing the worst possible rendition of Peaceful, Easy Feeling that could exist in this, or any theoretical, universe. We could not eat there.
