1. Camera 2, Image 1
After Brian drove me around Dubuque a bit on the morning of Sunday, October 20th, I went back to the Kennedy Mall and took some pictures. This is the main hall entrance. The mall opens at 10:00 a.m. on Sundays, but none of the stores open until around 11 or 12. Since I love dead malls, I tried to get some pictures of the place with no people around.
2. Camera 2, Image 2
I'm not sure what these giant tarp-covered things were, but I think they were part of the upcoming Christmas celebration theme for the mall.
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I wanted to get a good picture of this disturbing Halloween display in the middle of the mall, but it didn't work out. That light is actually sunlight coming through windows in the ceiling, which should give you an idea of just how dark it was in the mall.
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This picture looks pretty much exactly the way I thought it would-- too bad you can't see the strobe lights that were on either side of the escalators.
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This one didn't turn out very well at all. It was a massive hallway that led to a set of small exit doors in the back of the mall, but you can't really see anything. Oh well.
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This is the abandoned Disco bread factory in Dubuque. Right next door is a Sunbeam bread factory that is up and running, but all you can see of it in this picture is the little white sign next to the Disco building.
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Once I got to Davenport, I stumbled upon a mall and called Josh and Tara. I couldn't get in touch with them for a while, so I walked around the mall a bit. It was much, much larger than I expected, and by the time I finally got Josh on the phone, I was pretty wiped out from all that walking. Tara came and met me at the Barnes & Noble in the mall (after narrowly averting being crudely hit on by the drug-addled teens hanging out in the parking lot) and I followed her back to the apartments she and Josh live in. This picture is Tara in the parking lot of her apartment building, which there on the left.
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Here's the hallway Josh and Tara live in. It's the third floor, and in real life it looks absolutely nothing like this. I forgot to turn the flash on, so instead of looking like a blandly pleasant apartment building hallway it looks like a set from a David Lynch film.
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Josh and Tara's dogs were extremely excited to see me. Here they are standing around on the floor. Ginger, the one with the spindly little legs and the wild hair, is about 14 years old. I can never remember the other dog's name, but she's only a couple of years old. They're both insane.
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On the right in this picture, you can see my big fat stupid fingers. I'm dumb. Otherwise, this is Josh and Tara tending to their crazy dog and the little tiny dog Tara is giving a treat to belongs to Josh's mom, who was also visiting that weekend. I can't remember her name, but she was the smallest adult dog I had ever seen in person.
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Once the dogs were pacified and placed in their room, we went to eat at Fazoli's. Across the parking lot was a doctor's office or some other such building that had nothing to do with shopping. However, there was a shopping cart by the side of the building, so I decided to take a picture. When I took it, I had the flash on, so I expected that all this particular image would be would be a flash on the window. Clearly, I was wrong.
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However, I took another picture anyway, this time with the flash turned off.
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Then, the flash still off, Tara decided to take a picture of me. Here I am modeling Fazoli's Turtle Cheesecake. The cheesecake: delicious. Me: fat dork.
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I took this picture without looking. Bet you couldn't guess that. On our drive over to look at the Mississippi River, we passed over a large wooded park. This is almost a picture of said park, but not quite.
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Here's the Mississippi River. There's a little island or something in it, which caught my attention. So I took a picture.
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After winding around some more roads, we finally found one that ran literally right next to the river. On the left, you can see the small strip of land that separates the river from the road. On the right, whree you can't see, there are yards and houses. Tara and Josh informed me that these houses get flooded pretty much every year, and the people who live in them complain to the city, but honestly. If you're living fifty feet away from a giant river, I would think you'd kind of expect that sort of thing. A few of the houses were built above the ground to avoid this kind of problem, but not many.
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I don't know what these people were doing, but their entire yard was a mess of construction equipment, mounds of dirt, and piles of bricks. So much that it spilled right out onto the street. And there was a car coming at us. It made for some awkward driving.
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The vaguely creepy Alcoa Learning Center, which looked like it was lifted directly from some 1950s educational film and planted by the side of the road. Unfortunately, the window was up so you see more of the trees and my shirt than you do the Learning Center.
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Here is Whitey's Ice Cream. Josh explained that Whitey's is in a very strange place-- directly across the street from a predominantly black and hispanic neighborhood. It's almost like they named it on purpose, but Josh wasn't sure if the ice cream place or the neighborhood's ethnic makeup came first, so it's hard to say.
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I frequently go to Family Video to rent movies. When I'm in other cities or states, I like to go to different Family Video stores because I'm constantly amazed by the fact that they all look exactly the same. As I have pointed out before, I am a huge dork. Anyway, when I was planning my trip, I made it a point to find out from Josh and Tara where the Family Video was in Davenport so I could go visit. Here they are looking at Scorned 2.
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On my way back to Dubuque from Davenport, I saw some jets flying leaving contrails in the sky, and the clouds looked pretty damned cool, so I took a picture. This one is with my window up-- you can see some reflections from inside the car.
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And this one is with the window down, so there are no in-car reflections in the way.
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When Brian got home from work, we went to eat at Pizza Hut in Dubuque where a very drunk old man at another table kept trying to engage Kristine in conversation. He was very loud and somewhat unsettling. But the food was good, so we didn't hurry. Once we got back, Brian and I sat and talked while we watched The International Channel. This show was on called Leave It To The Nurses 4 (although I didn't find this out until later), and it was like a cross between The Benny Hill Show and ER. There was this really, really cute nurse on there with black hair pulled back in two little pigtails, and I tried to get her picture, but it didn't work.
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Kristine was getting ready to go to bed, so I asked if I could get a picture of her and Brian. I didn't want them to pose, but instead get them sitting on the couch with her doing her knitting and Brian reading a book (which is how they spend a lot of time, apparently), but we were all really tired and I wasn't going to be picky. This, once again, is in the living room of what Brian likes to call "The Cratchett Household."
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Once again, my fat idiot fingers get in the way of what could conceivably have been a cool picture. OH WELL. I'm not sure if that in the distance is Illinois or Iowa-- Dubuque is right on the state lines between those two states and Wisconsin, so it could be either. We were driving across the bridge over the Mississippi to Wisconsin when I took this picture.
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Once we were in Wisconsin, the nearest town of any decent size would have been nearly a half-hour drive, so instead we pulled off at the first rest area/welcome center. I decided to take the most boring picture possible of Wisconsin. So this picture is a good idea of what I saw of Wisconsin. Plus a little of my damned finger.
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Driving back into Iowa from our Wisconsin Adventure. The cliff in the distance is actually part of a park-- Brian informed me that you can actually go near the edge of that cliff and there's a great view, but just thinking about it gave me vertigo.
