Rural Iowa

There's a new country song by Adam Gregory that has a line in the first verse that goes a little something like this:
"Baby let's take a drive, top down, underneath the Carolina sky/ We can watch the fireflies try to out shine the stars..."

Well, I don't know about Carolina, but last Friday I spent the evening with a friend in the middle of nowhere.

And it was AMAZING.

The point of the trip was mostly to watch the swarms of fireflies that hang out over farm land. They don't come out much in the city and I really wanted to see and take pictures of them.

As it turned out, there weren't as many fireflies as we expected but I was more than OK with that because after the fireflies were done for the night, the STARS came out. And, goodness, were there stars. I was totally in awe.

My friend Ryan kept saying "Oh, this is nothing..."

Yeah, well that kid grew up on a farm away from all the city lights whereas I've been suburb-hopping for my whole life. Not that I'm knockin' the 'burbs, but you just don't see stars like that.

I don't remember the last time I could clearly see the whole three constellations I can actually identify.

But it wasn't just the stars and the fireflies that made it awesome. It was SO quiet and peaceful out there. We pulled off on the side of some road and except for the occasional car going by (and the beeping coming from my camera that I realized was actually quite obnoxious in the serenity of the country) we didn't hear much of anything. Well, I didn't. Ryan could hear cars on gravel roads a million miles away.

And it SMELLED good. I mean, REALLY good. Like... clean. There wasn't any smog or pollution or any of that nasty stuff in the city air.

It was just so awesome being out there. I mean, I was three feet away from a bean field watching the stars and fireflies. A lot of people make fun of Iowa and say there's nothing here but fields. First of all, that's not even close to true.

And second of all, those fields are incredible.

Fewer things are more gorgeous than rural Iowa. I promise.

So fireflies are a wee bit camera shy, but I did get this awesome picture of a car cruisin' down the road we were on...