Elk Horn, Iowa is Danish. And, it's rural. The fields are vast and the elevators are tall.
Elk Horn has a Danish windmill (actually transported to the U.S. from Denmark), a sod roof house and a tall, old, mossy tree worthy of climbing.
Just a few miles North of Elk Horn is Kimballton where my Great Grandparents, the Jeppesens and the Christiansens, are buried in a tiny cemetery on the top of a hill outside of town. Antique, rusty and broken farm equipment also reside at the top of a nearby hill.
We stopped through Irwin where Mom and her siblings attended elementary school. Mom found her inner nine-year-old and took on the old-fashioned and highly dangerous teeter-totter with Kenedy. The rest of us held our breath in anticipation of eventual catapulting.
The Juels seestas! They are the best!
Up the muddy hill from the corner of Umbrella and 2200th Road, near Irwin, once stood the Juels farmhouse. No more barn. No more chicken coop. No more trees. No more house! Jeez.
Great Grandma and Grandpa Juels lived in a house that backed up to the train tracks in the larger town of Manning. The Juels children participated in the annual Children's Day parade down Main Street.
This was a lot of history to absorb and wonderful, content exhaustion set in. Fear not. Manning had a coffee shop. Yes!