Davenport: art museum, bike ride

Day 7; 30 May 2021, Sunday

Davenport, Iowa

We visit the Figge Art Museum after riding the River Avenue bike path

11 miles by bicycle along the bike path. Love this sculpture of a boy skipping stones...

I had to circle back for this photo. Love the framing of the pillars....

If you were to follow the feed conveyor back to the right, out of the picture, you would see MANY really LARGE silos, in this case I’m guessing grain silos. This is the system to used to load up barges. I mentioned to Dan a couple of days ago that there sure wasn’t much river traffic (we saw a LOT of work transporting goods when we were on the Rhine, in Europe). Then yesterday we saw a “barge pusher”; I know they must have a better name than that, but that’s the function of that boat. You would not believe the string of barges that boat was pushing upriver. How do they STEER? How to they navigate thru passages? And how do they pull up to the side for offloading? I might guess that there were 7-8 barges in a line being pushed by one boat; each one (Dan and I are guessing here) could be 20 yards long.  So that boat is pushing barges well over the length of a football field! See what I mean about navigating and steering??

A little story from being on the road: Yesterday, while leaving Muscatine to come back to camp, we saw a cyclist going up a longish hill, saddlebags stuffed. This gal was just going for it. We got back to camp and a bit later, I looked out the screen door of the camper and she was setting up camp just diagonally next/behind us! She’s now working as a hospitalist in Wisconsin, after having her own internal medicine practice in Alaska for 20 years. Turns out she is a distance cyclist for fun and had just returned from a trip out west where she endured 40 mph headwinds/blowing sand/running out of water, freezing temps at night, etc. We talked with her a bit and told her we’d seen her just outside of Muscatine. Dr. Natalie sure had some interesting experiences! She was up bright and early this morning and before I had finished my breakfast she’d headed out. I bring this up as a caption to this photo only because we spotted her AGAIN, only this time it was in Davenport, and we were on the bike path below, and she was riding on this bridge, crossing from Iowa to Illinois, at the same time we were riding under it! Weird eh? (Another coincidence—she grew up in the Cleveland area and graduated from Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine! She actually had heard of Painesville and Ashtabula!)

Love this juncture of the Centennial Bridge in Davenport, and the fence around the minor league baseball team, the Quad City River Bandits. #linesandangles

Evidently we were on a full-service bike path. Here there’s air for your tires and a variety of tools in case you need to make a repair. How cool is that?!

The Figge Art Museum, above, was walking distance from the bike path. And, from the Ethiopian restaurant where we had a yummy lunch (we were hungry; I never even took my phone out for a photo!). Here is another one of those photos where #linesandangles. I love how the signal post is parallel to the top side of the building. 

This is the first upstairs work of art one sees when you climb the stairs to the second floor. I just loved how it echoed the black stairs and the white walls. More #linesandangles
Not sure yet if I want to make another post with the art I liked. I liked the size of this museum; you could linger (that would be me, reading all the cards) or you could walk through (Dan) and be done in 90 minutes. He sat on the main floor and let me wander at will. A new gallery show had opened yesterday and it was fascinating....

Tomorrow we have one of our longer driving days...to South Dakota. Stay tuned!