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Hancock House – Bed and Breakfast in Dubuque, Iowa


The first leg of our honeymoon was spent at a bed and breakfast in my hometown of Dubuque. Charles Hancock who ran the largest wholesale grocer/distribution business in the Midwest built the Hancock House in 1891. Interestingly he was also a key figure at Nutwood Park, a horseracing track that was once considered one of the premier tracks in the country. The Sisters of the Presentation own the land today and the track is long submerged under a pond that my siblings and I would walk to with old bread for feeding the ducks. Legend has it that one of the tracks owners buried his most famous horse in the center of the old track.

 

The Hancock House sits on top of the bluff at 11th street. Back in Charles Hancock’s day there would have been an elevator that transported people to and from their homes to the downtown businesses they owned. The elevator was gone by the 1920’s, replaced by a step set of stairs. The people who lived atop the city in those days were professionals. They owned big beautiful homes that overlooked the city and the river. Even today with the damage left by the latter half of the 20th century, it is still a beautiful view.

 

When I was a kid, I always wanted to climb the stairs on 11th street up to the bluff to see what was there and to look out over Dubuque. I saw the stairs every time I went to the library. Dubuque was the beneficiary of Carnegie money and built a temple style building with huge archways and columns at the top of the steps leading up from the sidewalk. It looked more like a government building than a library. Inside on the main floor the ceilings were high and had those old hanging fans that spun so slowly that you wondered if they gave off air at all. It was always quiet. Not like libraries today, which are more like community centers than places where the printed word, thoughts, dreams, and hopes are stored.

 

After checking out my books I would often wait for my mom and siblings on the front steps. Those stairs beckoned always. I pestered my mom to let me climb up and she never granted permission though once she let me go across the street to peer up them. The stairs were in miserable repair back in the 70’s and not safe. I never saw anyone walking them, but I wished I knew what was at the top. The unknown. A mystery in my boring little hometown.

 

Today the stairs are climbable though I doubt many would want to undertake them on a whim. They are step and pass under a stone archway that gives pause. At the top is a small circular drive and the Hancock House sits just to the right. It is a three-story building with turrets and a large friendly looking front porch right out of a movie.

 

Chuck and Susan are the proprietors. Married for 39 years and B&B managers for the last 13 of them, they have only hosted 3 guests they wouldn’t have back. Two were smokers who holed overnight with a cooler and their smokes and snuck away before breakfast leaving them to deal with a smoky room and new guests due that same day.

 

The rooms are named for the original occupants. We stayed in Florence’s room on the second floor. It is a turret room with a view of the city below. The bathroom looks vintage with a clawed tub and a toilet with a pull chain flush.

 

Breakfasts on both mornings were delicious. Easter Sunday was vanilla pancakes. We dined with two other couples, a software developer and his wife who worked as a biller for an insurance company, and an Asian couple who worked for a Taiwanese plumbing fixture manufacture in Chicago. They met on the job, hiding their relationship for two years by commuting together. Our hosts sat and chatted with us as we ate, refilling plates and cups as needed. The next day was baked croissants with an orange custard filling that was heavenly. Normally I shy away from bakes goods because of my peanut and citrus allergies but I couldn’t resist and paid a bit for it later. We enjoyed Chuck and Susan’s company again and Chuck and Rob discussed engineering and Montana, a place where they hope to retire in the next year or two.

 

The Hancock House is one of four B&B’s in the area that work together to promote the practice of these types of inns. It’s hard now that the casino businesses are moving into the harbor area in full force. So few people these days enjoy staying in small B&B’s, preferring the amenities of the big hotels like Hilton, which has set up recently near the river walk.

 

Hancock House is within driving (and walking distance if you aren’t too much of a 21st century wuss) of the downtown and the riverboat/casinos). There is parking, an accessible beverage and snack area and free wireless Internet that enabled me to get my blogging fix. We enjoyed our stay very much.

 

East of Eden


“So”, my husband asks, “do all American towns and cities have an east side where they keep all the trashy people?”

 

This came on our return drive from southern Illinois and our honeymoon. We had been though East Peoria and East Galesburg. The first place was a pee break at a 66 station near the airport where people had no sense of personal space while queuing up and couldn’t seem to walk off without lotto tickets or smokes. The latter was home to one of the largest mobile home parks I had yet to see on the trip, and at one point I was beginning to wonder if everyone south of Springfield lived in easily transportable abodes. Illinois appears to have been settled by people who believe highly combustible funnel cloud magnets should always gather in large numbers out on the open prairie.

 

Rob’s Iowan experiences include an eastside of Des Moines and an East Dubuque, have colored his perceptions. But honestly, east is not often prime real estate. Why do you think God sent Adam and Ever to live there? It’s home to American Idol voters and the idea that everything one will ever need out of life can be found within a 2 mile radius of Grandma’s house because she is the only one with a permanent address. It’s that bit of ground that we all want to flee as teens but that too many of us end up being buried under.

 

I have been reading Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, a book about the multiple lives of our souls (aka reincarnation). It says that we choose our lives in order to learn and grow. But who would choose to be the mullet do’d cashier at the corner gas mart or the guy purchasing two 12 packs of Milwaukee’s Best with a couple cans of Copenhagen at 10:30 on a Friday morning? Are these learning opportunities? Or destinies gone horribly wrong?

 

Much of what we saw, outside the national park, was poverty. The neighborhoods on the east side of Murphysboro were filled with worn homes often blockaded from the rest of the street by the kind of junk that even Oprah intervention people throw away. In a lot of ways these streets were like the old Walmart joke – a little piece of Arkansas every where you go – because if I hadn’t known I was in Illinois I would have thought I was back in the area surrounding Devils Den State Park near Fayetteville. Murphysboro, Carbondale, Marion. Towns that bled into each other, held together by strip malls and car lots. The differences between classes of the people who lived there plainly evident in the vehicles and the clothes and the conditions of the homes. Makes you wonder what kind of  assignments God was handing out that could have resulted in any of this or what makes us chose such lessons.

A Cabin by the Pond – Carbondale, Illinois


Rustic doesn’t begin to describe the cabin we rented for our honeymoon in Southern Illinois. Rob found it on the Internet and there were few pictures but it sounded good and was close to the Shawnee National Forest.

I know what you are thinking. What about a national park spells honeymoon? Where is the romance? Where is the heat and passion? Those are things we have all the time really. We are passion personified. We don’t need a honeymoon to heat up. However, despite our penchant for unusual romantic spots, we will not be adding this cabin stay to our list of favorites. As Rob summed it up, “ Great sex and a couple good hikes, but the place was a dump.” Read Full Article