When my wife and I decided to head out to Denver Colorado to watch our niece play softball over the July 4th holiday, I quickly looked at Google Maps to see how long the drive would take. You might wonder why we just didn't fly?
The problem with watching softball is sometimes you end up doing it all day (depending on when the games are scheduled). Sure, you could sit in bleachers all day, but we prefer to take our camping chairs with us to be more comfortable. In addition to that, it was quite hot while we were in Colorado, so traveling with a EZ-Up style sun shade was a necessity. As you might imagine, those items don't travel well on an jet, so we decided to drive.
My sister in law and nieces flew from Columbus, while my brother in law drove their gear out himself. He did it in two days. We could have technically gotten to Denver in two days as well, but I'm getting old and I didn't want to run myself down like that.
That's why I decided Davenport Iowa would be the perfect place for our first night's stop. It was about seven to eight hours away from our home giving us some good distance on the road, but not too much.
You can read more about our first stop in Davenport in this post.
Getting to Davenport was no small task... Traffic was moving along pretty well until we got to Gary Indiana. If you have traveled through that area yourself, you are probably started laughing as soon as you read that last sentence. Gary, IN is notorious for having horrible traffic. It's where several major expressways come together and it is a huge hub for traffic heading out of Chicago.
It's just horrible. We lost between a half hour and an hour sitting in traffic, but the Eastbound lanes had a rougher time.
When I was a kid, I spent quite a bit of time traveling around the Eastern part of the US with my family. 
This was her first time in Iowa.
As I mentioned yesterday, I also believe it was her first time ever crossing the Mississippi River in a car. We've flown over it several times together, but it's always a little more special when you cross over it with a car.
I actually lied a little bit earlier. The first thing we did when we pulled into Davenport was visit our hotel. Then we stopped at Vander Veer Botanical Garden to look around. I've said this in posts before, but since Covid happened, the state of hotels has really went downhill. Perhaps it was happening already and Covid just exacerbated it, who knows.
We stayed at the DoubleTree by Hilton right in downtown Davenport. DoubleTree's are usually a more upper class hotel, but this one didn't feel that way. It seemed run down and honestly not as clean as I would expect. After checking in we went up to our room only to find a large puddle on the floor.
I called the front desk and they explained that new AC units were recently installed, but incorrectly and it was causing the issue. They were going to send a maintenance guy up with a bucket to catch the water.
So we traded the view above, for one less desirable. If you have ever been to an Embassy Suites (also owned by Hilton), you might know about the wide open internal space where some rooms face the outside wall and some rooms face inside. That was the kind of room we ended up with. There was no puddle on the floor, but it still felt like the A/C unit wasn't working properly, which made for a warm humid night of sleep.
Maybe it's just the Hilton line of hotels that have went downhill. I have a Marriott Rewards Card that maybe I should start using. Even the Hampton Inns we stayed at later in our trip weren't that great.
We spent a little bit of time driving around the downtown part of Davenport after visiting the Botanical Garden. It appeared there was a minor league baseball team based out of the city, but we didn't try to get tickets or anything, we had to be back on the road early the next day!
Instead we ended up at a place called Front Street Brewery which is purported to be Iowa's oldest brewpub.
It was a cool old building with an interesting vibe, but the food menu didn't have a lot of options that appealed to
The vanilla porter was delicious and the fried cheese curds were also quite good. They had some house made ranch that worked perfectly with the curds as well. Given other circumstances we probably would have had a very nice meal here.
Instead, we made our way right around the corner to a regional chain called The Barrel House. It was a nice evening so we decided to sit outside and we enjoyed a couple more cocktails.
The food on the other hand was a different story. I would totally order it again and eat here again. I got a burger with a whole mess of stuff on it as you can see. I even sweet talked our waitress into having them add some of their house made pickles to it. They were sweet and spicy which added a nice kick to the burger.
Davenport Iowa is a cool little town with a lot more going on than I would have guessed. Our waitress at The Barrel mentioned that they just legalized weed in Iowa and a place down the street was opening a movie theater where you could partake as you watched a movie. I don't really feel like we give off the "stoner" vibe, but she must have just assumed when we said we were heading to Denver. Is that the only reason people go to Colorado?
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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or