October 12, 2024
After a one-week break with no activities, we picked right back up the following weekend for a trip to southeastern Iowa for the Villages of Van Buren County Scenic Drive Festival with Craig and Sue.
The Villages of Van Buren are small towns in southeastern Iowa and consist of villages such as Cantril, Keosauqua and Bentonsport. Through these villages runs the Historic Hills Scenic Byway, which Brandy drove me down last November shortly after my surgery following the accident.
The Villages along the route will support vendors and events over a weekend in October and visitors have the opportunity to see some beautiful scenery while doing a little shopping and eating.
Before we got back to Iowa from our Summer Tour, we had already been invited on the trip so we committed. Shortly before the event, we had picked up a 2015 Nissan Quest minivan so we used that for its inaugural journey.
On the morning of, we stopped by Craig and Sue’s to pick them up, then headed south on highway 63 through Bloomfield, then made a left on highway 2 which took us to our first destination, the Dutchman’s Store.
The Dutchman’s Store bills itself as “an old time general store” and boy, does it live up to that moniker. They have the full gamut of merchandise, from food to clothes, to shoes, to furniture.
Brandy and I had visited the store once before when they were in a very small building deeper in Cantrill, but they have since moved to a much larger space just on the outskirts of town. The store was still busy but with more room, it was a much more tolerable experience.
The four of us walked in and decided to give ourselves half an hour then meet back up at the entrance to move on to our next stop. We shopped around for a bit, never really losing track of each other.
I wound up with two pair of shoes, a couple of snacks I’ve only ever gotten from this store, some candied jalapenos, and Brandy came out with a handful of pickled goods like garlic, beets and asparagus. I tell ya, they sell EVERYTHING there.
We packed back into the van and continued on to our next stop, Bonaparte. We parked in their “downtown” district and walked around stopping at the vendor booths and popping into the stores here and there. I picked up a small tub of freeze dried candy corn.
From there, we headed back west stopping in Bentonsport where we braved an extremely crowded parking lot trying to find a place to park only to park right next to the Bentonsport Campground where a majority of the vendors were set up.
We browsed around a bit, then I broke away from the group to take a look at the nearby Bentonsport Bridge.
The Bentonsport Bridge was built in 1882 and remained in service as a vehicle bridge for over 100 years until, in 1986, the county conservation department took over ownership. Eight years later, the village as well as some private donors began rehabilitating the bridge, converting it to a pedestrian bridge as we see it today.
The four of us regrouped and shopped around a bit more, me picking up a spice rub and hot sauce from a nearby general store before we headed on to our final stop, Riverbend Pizza and Steakhouse, the same place Brandy and I ate on our first drive down the old scenic byway.
We had to wait a moment to be seated as the place was pretty crowded, then the service was pretty slow, again, being a very busy weekend for them. We got our food after a lengthy wait, then, after we ate and paid, we headed back to Craig and Sue’s to drop them off, then on home for us.
Conclusion
It wasn’t a terribly exciting trip. We didn’t spend much time on the scenic byway itself; we took highway 2 pretty much all the way to Bonaparte, then from Keosauqua, we took highway 34 back into town but it was a nice day trip and it was good to spend some time with Craig and Sue after having been gone the previous four months.
I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to take many pictures as I was driving the whole time, but did get some pics at the couple of stops we made along the way, all of which can be found on my Photo Diary.
Up next, the following weekend, Brandy and I went up to Boone, Iowa, to ride the Boon & Scenic Valley Railroad’s Wolf Lunch Train. Stay tuned for that write up!