First, two additions to yesterday's report:

While at the Lincoln library, one of the volunteers told us that he would take a picture of us around wax statues of the Lincoln family. My mom, in her inimitable fashion, decided to lean up to Lincoln's face and act like she was giving it a kiss. After snapping the photo, the man got a horrified look on his face, handing the camera back to us and exclaiming "The man's dead! Show a little respect!"

Also, my mom called the closet at the hotel room a "garage." She didn't realize what she had said until my dad and I looked at her for a few seconds.

We began today by heading west on Route 20, which took us to Dyersville in about thirty minutes. We wound our way off the road and into picturesque corn fields. Soon we found ourselves at the Field of Dreams movie site.

The field is perhaps not as big as it seems in the movie, and the famous outfield corn hasn't yet grown to full height, but the field itself is otherwise in pristine shape and the house exactly like it's seen in the film. The addition of a few signs (containing the most horrible typographical errors) and a gift shop disguised to look like a concession stand were the only two major additions since the film's release.

This was where we tried to get my mom to "float." "Floating" has been a theme of our trips since the second one, when I tried to take a picture of the Grand Tetons only to get a picture of her mid-run and thus appearing to float. This happy accident is hard to replicate when you're trying, although she has since successfully floated at Acadia National Park and on Prince Edward Island.

I must have taken sixty rapid-fire pictures of her running around trying to keep her feet off the ground as much as possible. The other fans on the field seemed to find this behavior abnormal to say the least, and their worries were only compounded when my dad and I did the same.

We got an ornament and pennant there, and were rung up by perhaps the least enthusiastic (and thus slowest) cashier in America, then got out of the heat back towards the road.

After a brief stop to marvel at the exterior and interior architecture of the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, we wormed our way back through the Dyersville downtown and back onto Route 20, where we only had to stop for gas at the rather unsavory home town of one of my dad's old roommates.

The road went to two lanes from the freeway it had been, then had spurts of freeway from then on out as construction crews dotted the area in the effort to widen it. The temperature kept going up, eventually topping out at a sweltering 100 degrees. Overall, the landscape is what my dad referred to as "pizza-shaped," because "there's all these hills on the edges and it's flat in the middle."

The terrain was somewhat terraced like pictures of Asian rice farms that I've seen. The hills on the western side have been turned into farmable area by this method. I was extremely surprised by this terrain.

There was nothing to do but get to Sioux Falls. Now, Sioux Falls is in Iowa, but its suburbs are split by the Missouri and Sioux Rivers. Thus, South Sioux Falls is in northeast Nebraska while North Sioux Falls is in southeast South Dakota.

Our first Sioux Falls stop was the stadium of the Sioux Falls Explorers, and independent minor-league team. They were not in town but one of the exiting employees saw us and took us inside the stadium. When we told him that we'd like to buy a pennant, he went into the back and gave us one free of charge.

North Sioux Falls allows gambling, which accounts for its growth vis-à-vis the other two slices of the Sioux Falls pie. With every restaurant in North Sioux Falls a mucky-looking affair attached to or within a casino, we went back over to Sioux Falls. Out of respect for the fact that Takuma Nuva will not make it to BrickFair this year, we thought it our duty to eat at the first Culver's we could find. This Culver's was better by far than the one we had eaten at in Dubuque. The only real difference between our orders then and now was that I got a larger batch of deep-fried cheese curds and no bacon at this one.

En route back to the hotel, we checked out an obelisk that we'd seen going into the city. This turned out to be the monument that marked the grave of Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the Lewis and Clark expedition to die on the journey. His demise was most likely from appendicitis.

Tomorrow: the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, then onwards across the state as far as time and other factors will allow.