(Not added to blog site until 8/20/2026 – decided to add it
as a single page.)
After a number of fits and starts we finally found a
mutually agreeable time to go out to Des Moines and visit with Robert and
Ashley from June 12, 2025 to June 17, 2025.
Here’s a summary of our trip.
DAY 1: 6/12/2025
We flew out of San Jose on Delta on Thursday afternoon at
1:40P, bound for Minneapolis (MSP) with an expected arrival of 7:15P and a
connecting flight leaving at 7:55P, arriving at DSM at 9:08P. Although we’d been prepared to simply grab a
Lyft from the airport directly to the hotel, the kids assured us it wouldn’t be
a problem to pick us up. They mentioned
that rideshare options tended to dry up as the night went on – something that
would turn out to be prescient on their part.
Mike was kind enough to drop us at SJC so we wouldn’t have
to deal with our car, and we arrived at SJC just a bit past noon. We wanted enough time to have a full lunch as
we were a bit unsure what our food opportunities at MSP would be, given the
potentially short layover and possible 15-20 minutes needed to move to another
terminal once we were there. For similar
reasons we also chose to check our bags, even though both could have fit in the
overhead bins. We didn’t want to have to
drag those through MSP and preferred to let the airline handle checking them
through to MSP.
For reasons unknown E’s boarding pass wasn’t marked for
PreTSA, so we both used the normal security line – which likely didn’t cost us
more than 5 minutes of additional time in line.
Once through security, we found ourselves directly at Gate 11, where our
flight would board later. Immediately
next door was our intended lunch choice of Gordon
Biersch, where we both got a variation of a hamburger plus fries. The food came out quick and hot – but pretty
much devoid of any taste at all. We were
both amazed at how they managed this trick.
Post-lunch we only needed to kill about 15 minutes before boarding
started.
The flight itself was fine.
We were in Comfort+ seating with extra legroom, and even with my
backpack under the seat in front of me – and even being the middle and window
of a 3x3 arrangement – we were pretty comfy.
Onboard, food was limited to snacks, although we could have
theoretically purchased one of their snack box options. We landed at MSP pretty much on-time.
We’d been alerted via text (and app) before boarding the flight at SJC that the connecting flight was delayed. At first glance, we were going to be delayed about 30 minutes, with departure pushed back to about 8:20P. Upon landing, found a text from Robert that clearly hinted at further delays, and revised departure times became the theme of the night. It was immediately obvious after exiting the flight from SJC that we were going to be at MSP for “a while”, and that we weren’t going to have to worry about trying to find something to snack – we could have a full dinner. We got ourselves from Terminal F over to Terminal C, where we expected our connection to eventually depart from, and ate dinner at a place called “Twins Grill”, which was baseball themed. There were big photos along one wall of ballparks throughout Minnesota including, immediately next to our table, Dick Putz Field! For airport food it actually wasn’t too bad – E had some zucchini tacos while I had chicken strips and fries. The waitress was very “Midwest friendly”.
Dinner over, we made our way over to the gate that was
listed for our flight which, during dinner, had started to show a departure of
just after 11P. Another flight was
leaving our gate around 1030P, and the gate agents did advise that those of us
going to DSM were, indeed, in the correct place and that a new airplane had
been dispatched from somewhere in Alabama that was supposed to become our
plane. The agent also told us (around
1020P or so) that the plane WAS en route and that he therefore felt pretty
confident our flight WOULD happen.
Phew!. Over time, the inbound
plane’s arrival time got pushed again, and we were advised that we’d likely be
leaving around 1140P. Although we
actually boarded a little later than that we still managed to make it to DSM
around 1230A and to the hotel just before 100A, courtesy of the kids who had
kept track of our flight and picked us up.
We had arranged a King Executive room
at Des Lux Hotel, located in
downtown DSM. The kids had offered us
space at their house, but we’d chosen a hotel both because we wanted a larger
bed and (mostly) because we wanted to ensure we had good air conditioning. During the trip the average daily temperature
would be in the “feel like” range of 85-95 degrees. While checking in the night desk clerk REALLY
wanted to chit chat – and all we wanted to do was get our keys and go up to
bed! We finally crawled into bed around
130A, but not before setting the alarm for 845A in order to have time to get
breakfast (which ran daily from 7A-10A).
The hotel itself was very nice. Built in 1912, it was richly appointed with
dark wood and high ceilings everywhere.
Our room, on the 3rd of five floors, faced the interior core
of the building. That meant our window,
oddly enough, looked down on a first floor space that looked something like a
drawing room, complete with a large couch and fireplace. The bed was OK, and with a desk chair plus
padded straight-back chair we had room to read comfortably.
DAY 2: 6/13/2025
The hotel’s breakfast room offered the same food each day,
but we noted there was enough variety in the non-hot food selection to please
most people. The daily hot choice was
scrambled eggs (VERY dense), cubed potatoes, and what looked like sliced
sausage disks but managed to taste like really excellent bacon. It took me until the second breakfast to
realize how good these were and to stock up accordingly. They also offered about 10 different cold
cereal choices, several breads (including bagels and small donuts), yogurts,
fresh fruit (which was, however, usually in short supply by the time we had
breakfast each day), and a selection of snack-like foods (power bars,
cookie-like things, powdered donuts, and the like. We pocketed a couple of these each morning to
build up a supply of snacks for our train journey home.
Robert’s job was still new enough that he couldn’t take PTO on Friday, but Ashley had graciously taken PTO and picked us up around 10A on Friday morning to take us over to Blank Park Zoo, where she guided us around the (very nice) exhibits. She had arranged for us to have special BTS access to the penguin feeding as well as the pinniped demonstration. For the former, we followed the two keepers doing the feeding into the exhibit and sat on rocks about 2’ away from the penguins while they did the feeding. We were close enough to (literally) get an occasional splatter of fish guts. For the demo, featuring a seal and sea lion performing various trained behaviors, we joined the zookeeper who was reading the show’s script on the bridge inside the performance area. Very fun to be so close up.
After the zoo we had lunch at Be-Bop’s,
which is apparently a DSM institution offering various burger-ish meals. The air-conditioned dining room was VERY
welcome by this time. We had a surplus
of salty fries as the portions were very generous, but we otherwise managed to
polish off our meals. By this time E and
I were both happy to be dropped off back at the hotel where we showered (again)
and relaxed until Robert came by around 3:40P – the office having called it an
early day at 3:30P – and we went over to R&A’s place, which we immediately
toured. We then killed a few hours just
relaxing on the couch while Trout, their new cat, demonstrated his non-stop
energy by running around, seeking skritches, and doing an infinite number of
things that required someone to spray him with water or otherwise distract him
from things he wasn’t supposed to do.
Gracie, on the other hand, spent most of her time sitting quietly on the
porch.
For dinner, the kids had picked a creole BBQ place called Flying Mango that they like. It is, apparently, their destination of
choice for Date Night. It happens to be
a place that Guy
Fieri visited as part of his show “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives” – which is
made obvious by the fact that one of the items on the menu is simply titled
What Guy Had. We shared the night’s
special appetizer (pulled port queso) which was very tasty. I had
their ribs (pretty good, with their house spicy BBQ sauce from the table
squeeze bottle) along with their cowboy beans (quite good) and oven-roasted
spiced apples (which were not, as hoped, as nice as Chili’s cinnamon apples),
while E and R both had Red Beans and Rice and Ash had her much-adored pulled
pork sandwich. We ordered a couple of
their bread puddings for dessert, which were served with a mango-lemon sauce –
which I didn’t like but, fortunately, was served on the side. With dessert I finally placed the odd taste
of the Hurricane I’d ordered – they’d added some mango puree to the drink. Post-dinner we had the kids drop us off at
the hotel to end our night.
DAY 3: 6/14/2025
Next day the kids picked us up around 10A and we made our
way over to the Farmer’s
Market, which takes up about a 15 square block area of downtown, in the
area fronting the Polk County
Court House. Robert’s job includes a
permit for a secured parking garage (shared with a hotel) that was just a block
or two away, so we had easy access. The
market is apparently ranked the 2nd best in the US. At this time of year there’s little produce
offered for sale – and the stalls that were selling it were displaying small
quantities. I understand that, come August,
there’d be a huge amount of fresh produce on display. We spent about an hour or so wandering
through before deciding which of the (copious) food stalls we’d grab lunch
from. E and I decided to get some
eggrolls (hot and tasty) while the kids ended up trying an Indian food vendor –
having noted that they hadn’t yet found any decent Indian food in DSM. What they got was pretty good, as per them.
Once again, we kept our activities limited due to the heat
and humidity and had the kids deliver us back to the hotel around 130P or so,
where we showered (again) and relaxed until they came by again to pick us up
for a 608P Iowa Cubs game. It was Margaritaville night, featuring the
home team in special flowery uniforms.
Once again, Robert’s parking pass came in handy and we walked the ½ mile
or so from parking to stadium,
where we had tickets behind the first base dugout. It was quite warm in the sun, so we delayed
food until around 7PM when it started cooling off. E and I sampled their bratwursts, which were
OK, and I supplemented with some nachos – simply a bag of chips with a cup of
mostly tasteless “jalepeno” cheese sauce.
The game itself, against the Reds’ Lexington team, was a
massive blowout with the Cubs losing 14-2 – and the game wasn’t as close as
that score indicates! At one point the
Cubs gave up 4 homers in one inning, and they didn’t have their first 1-2-3
inning until the 8th. When
their 9th inning pitcher’s first pitch was only 67mph I thought they
had brought in a knuckleballer – until we realized that they had thrown a
position player out there to finish off the blow-out. There was a Giants sighting: the Cubs pitcher
for the 7th and 8th innings was Phil Bickford. He did better than most, “only” giving up two
runs. Given all the runs and pitching
changes, the game didn’t finish up until just after 9P and we ended up back at
the hotel by about 945P or so.
DAYS 4-6: 6/15/2025 to
6/17/2025
With Sunday being our final day, we checked out of the hotel
and had the kids pick us up at 11A and they took us over to the Pappajohn
Sculpture Park, where we enjoyed wandering the various pathways and looking
at the sculptures. We stopped at one
point so we could all talk to Andrew, who had called to wish me a Happy Father’s
Day.
Following the art displays, the kids took us to Raygun, a fun
little store that, among other things, is the merch outlet for The Onion. The store is filled with books, t-shirts, and
fun items. Sadly, we didn’t find any
Christmas ornaments, which we would have gladly purchased.
We then went back to their house for a relaxing
afternoon. We kept food simple, with R
picking up (very good) sandwiches from their local grab-and-go store, and
dinner being the fine cuisine of McDonald’s.
In between we chatted and also fit in a game of Wingspan. Finally, however, it was time to drive to
Osceola where we were scheduled to pick up Amtrak’s California Zephyr at
825P. We left around 7P and quickly ran into a HUGE
downpour after leaving DSM that lasted about 10 minutes – but was clearly really
stressful for Ash, who was driving.
Fortunately, it cleared up for the last 25 minutes or so of the drive,
and we were soon saying goodbye to them at the train station. Luckily, they had a much easier drive home.
Our train was running just a couple of minutes behind
schedule, and we were onboard and leaving by about 835P. Sadly, before we hit the next stop we had to
stop due a freight train ahead of us, and we were further speed-limited due to
flash flood warnings. This began an
ever-increasing gap between our scheduled times versus our actual times that
eventually translated into us being 3 hours behind schedule with just a few
hours – a value that would persist until the end, when we’d pull into
Emeryville around 750P instead of 438P as planned.
The lateness of the train really wasn’t a big deal – but
what WAS a problem was that the dining car’s kitchen was experiencing technical
problems that impacted all three meals of Monday. Basically, anything needing a stove appeared
to be unavailable. So, for example, the
breakfast menu, normally offering 5 items plus a meat side, was limited to
microwaveable foods w/no meat. Lunch was
basically sandwiches. And, most
critically, they basically couldn’t offer anything from their normal dinner
menu. Instead, dinner was delayed until
about 730P because they had to bring it onboard from Grand Junction. We ended up with boxes of BBQ that got
delivered to our cabin. We (randomly)
got a box with a half chicken + chips + bottle of water, plus one with a pulled
chicken sandwich. It was OK, but I had
really been looking forward to trying their signature steak in the dining car. On Tuesday morning they’d resolved the issues
and we were back to their normal menus.
Overall, we were not fans of the sleeper car
experience. The seating was pretty
uncomfortable (particularly hard on my bony butt!) and the upper bunk (my bed)
was a bit awkward to get into to, and just a HAIR too short for my tastes, so I
felt a bit like a pretzel. The ride on
the first night was quite bumpy. A table
companion at breakfast, an experienced train passenger, said that she was
surprised because the Zephyr was reputed to have one of the best rides in the
fleet. Although it was better the second
night, we never saw the overall attraction to sleeping on the train. The bathroom is TINY. I tried to take a shower on Monday morning
and settled for simply washing my hair.
We ended up making the trip w/o showering.
We did sample the observation car for about 90 minutes during the early portion of the ride out of Denver. While the view was better than that offered in the sleeper room itself, the fact is that, after the amazing views of our Alaskan railroad trip, even the splendors of the Rockies seem anti-climactic. As a result, we didn’t feel a need to avail ourselves of the observation car again during the trip and spent the rest of our time in our room, reading. It was a bit of a surprise to discover that Amtrak didn’t provide wireless on the train. Thankfully, I was able to turn on my phone’s hotspot and we could access the internet that way. It is amazing how well-connected the US is these days. There were only a few hours where we seemed to lack cellular access.
Once we exited the train in Emeryville around 755P, it took
only about 15 minutes to get over to the MacArthur BART station via Lyft
(including wait time for the pickup) and we managed to get onto the platform
one minute before the train arrived for our 60 minute trip to the Berryessa
station. From there it was about 25
minutes for a Lyft home, where we walked into the house just before 10P.
Had a wonderful time seeing the kids and will look forward
to future trips – but we’ll stick to airplanes from here on out!