It was a hot day in Iowa, so we planned our outdoor activities early. We were thankful for the cloudy skies as we parked at the Pappajohn Sculpture Park. Every city needs a little love, and over 70 cities all over the world have a copy of this famous sculpture.
Pappajohn Park sits on four acres of prime real estate in downtown Des Moines. The iconic sculpture of this park is "Nomade," a crouching figure whose skin is made of letters. The artist explains that just as our bodies are made up of cells, our communication is made up of individual letters. Denisa took the same posture as the Nomade.
We found a huge spider, with horses in the background at the Pappajohn sculpture park.
The horses were our favorites. They looked like they were made of old weathered driftwood.
But it's actually cast bronze. The process to change wood to bronze takes three months. Then patina is applied to mimic the look of wood. A close-up picture shows the detail of the finished product.
We found more strange and wonderful sculptures in this big park in downtown Des Moines. There were a lot of weird faces peeking out at visitors in the park. It was surprisingly cool--in temperature and in experience--for our first stop in this city in July.
Our next stop was the lovely downtown river walk. Des Moines is divided in two by the Des Moines River. It falls into roaring cascades off a man-made scalloped ledge just past the bridge. We walked across the "Women of Achievement" pedestrian bridge, where Iowa honors its most achieved females.
That brought us to the other side of the river park, and a tribute to the Asian immigrants that have been welcomed to Iowa.
We also loved the fishing pole sculpture at River View Park. Denisa was swinging from the fishing pole, while the bobber was floating in the blue sea of the playground.
As it was heating up, we hustled across the river to get to the Iowa State Capitol for the 11:30 tour. We admired the outside first, knowing that we were going to get the inside scoop about this building from our guide. She told us the golden dome was the real deal. The gold leaf covering has to be replaced every 25-30 years and will take about six pounds of real gold to recoat.
We had a great guide that spent 1.5 hours teaching us some Iowa history. For example, Iowa wanted their capitol to be showy, so it's one of ten state capitols with a gold dome. But it's the only capital with five separate domes. While standing on the first floor, we tried to get a good picture of the inside of the biggest dome high above us. Pay particular attention to the square windows close to the top, because we'll see more of them later.
We visited the old Iowa Supreme Court, where she described the 20-year-old artist who got the job of hand-carving the front panels out of a single plank of rare teak wood.
The detail of the carving was incredible! Forty years later, when they increased the number of judges from five to seven, they needed more teak-wood planks carved. The original artist was now 60 years old, and he agreed to make two more to match.
Iowa became the U.S.'s 29th state. This rare 29-star flag was in the Iowa state museum.
Because they were the 29th state, they chose to use 29 different kinds of marble inside the building. They used the grand staircase to showcase as many kinds and colors of marble as possible.
From that staircase, we looked up to see a lovely set of murals. We assumed they were paintings, but we would see them up close later in our tour.
We next visited the Senate chambers, with its fancy Victorian opulence. There was something about this room that felt a little like we were on a cruise ship.
Iowa is the only state that doesn't provide individual offices for its legislators. Their desk in the chamber is their only office space. An extra chair and small desk is provided beside each senator for their one assistant's office space.
The Law Library is the most photographed room in the capitol.
That's because it is on the list of the ten prettiest law libraries in the world.
It features floor-to-ceiling wooden spiral staircases that the librarians would have to climb to get to those heavy law books on the top floors. They must have been in great shape! Today you would rarely see a librarian on the stairs because most of their volumes are available electronically.
An interesting item that can be "checked out" at the Law Library is this full skeleton, hanging in its own display case. Jokes abound that this is the last person that had an overdue book at the library.
The House of Representatives has 100 members, and again they have no offices. So there are 200 chairs in this big room, so the assistants have a place to office as well.
We climbed a couple flights of steps to get a bird's eye view of the chandeliers in this room.
Going up those flights of steps also put us at the level of those murals we saw earlier from far below.
What looked like paintings from a distance, were actually mosaics made from a million pieces of tile--each about the size of a thumb nail. They were made in Italy, and then shipped to the United States to be put together like giant jigsaw puzzles.
Mark was chosen as the special tour group member to verify several unusual characteristics of the mosaics. After 45 years of hanging out with Denisa, he is an expert at recognizing unusual.
The detail of the mosaics were wonderful, and we were glad that we took the tour so we could see them up close.
Remember those windows at the top of the dome in one of the first pictures? That's where we were heading next. Our guide led us through a locked door and then up 91 more spiraling steps to get to the "whisper deck".
It's called the whisper deck because the domed shape holds the sound so perfectly. Our guide could whisper a message from one side, and we could still hear it on the other side of that wide expanse. Those windows that looked so tiny from the ground floor were actually 25 feet tall. You can see Mark in his red shirt at the railing to give some size perspective.
From our spot at that top railing, we could see the Civil War memorial that was hanging at the top of the dome.
It was a long ways down to the first floor from the top of this capitol tour!
It was an interesting view as our group spiraled back down the 91 steps from the top of the dome.
We thought the Iowa capitol tour was one of the classiest we have ever had. It was another reason to love Des Moines. One of these days we're going to count up how many state capitols we have visited, but we're guessing it's somewhere between 30 and 40.
Here's one last view of that dome from the bottom, now that we know what it's like up there.
As we exited the capitol building, we went towards the green space to the south. We spotted an interesting baby bird for our wildlife picture of the day. We didn't expect to see a young raptor in our city tour of Des Moines. We wonder if he had an unsuccessful fledge experience, and was stuck on the ground today. Google thinks this was a young American Kestrel?
As we headed south on our walk, we came to the collection of statues that most capitol cities seem to collect. This one honors William Allison for his 43 years as a U.S. Senator. The flower garden at its base was lovely this summer.
This veterans' memorial was especially impressive. The picture was even more impressive with the capitol building's domes peeking over the tree behind it. Denisa is a very unimpressive size, standing on the bottom steps of the memorial.
Another fun picture in the plaza is of the map of Iowa, with its neatly squared 99 counties labeled.
By this time we were needing lunch, and we found a little place with a 4.9 (out of 5) star rating that was just a mile away. We had a famous Grinder Sandwich at Graziano Bros. grocery store. We hate to complain, but there was just too much meat on that sandwich even when we split it. That's an unusual "complaint." We added some Italian grocery items to our shopping list to eat later.
Our last stop of our lovely Des Moines day was the Iowa Historical Museum. We don't visit many museums, but we will stop by most of the ones with free admission. We liked that this museum had a Hollywood section that included many of the films made in Iowa. Since we visited the Bridges of Madison County yesterday, we watched the film clip from the movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. We figured out that Clint (who is now 96 years old) was 65 when he directed and starred in the movie. That means that we are the same age now, as Clint was when he visited Iowa in 1995. We wonder if he experienced the love of Des Moines too.
