10.05.13 Forest City and Mason City, Iowa

Our first Saturday off in months!  I can love Saturdays again!!!

We’re giving our son power-of-attorney to represent us at the act of sale for our rental property on Brenda Drive.  We needed to get the power of attorney notarized so I did a google search and found the nearest notary was a few miles way in Mason City, Iowa at a PostNet store.

We drove over there, seeing many thousand acres of corn fields along the way.  Just what I’ve always thought back roads Iowa would look like.  I promise I won’t post a picture of every wind turbine we see but in one of the corn pictures there are about 30 turbines in the distance.  If you click on the second corn field picture and enlarge it you can see them. It’s amazing how many of these we see here.

The young manager, Jennifer, at PostNet was very nice and helpful.  However, as we were going over the paper we realized that we needed two witnesses (which couldn’t include the notary) but there was no one else in the store.  Not to be stopped I said “I’ll go recruit some people from the store next door.”  The store was a Rue 21 which had many customers in the store.  One of the two sales ladies asked if she could help me so I told her what we needed and I felt like I was in one of those reality shows that put people on the spot. While she was discussing this with the only other sales lady I see Roy outside talking to a young lady and figured he was recruiting her.  Into the store they walked and sure enough she said she would be a witness.  I turned around to the sales ladies and told them we only need one witness now so one of them came with us and the young lady from outside over to the PostNet store.  They witnessed us signing the form and we thanked them and the manager for their services. If you’ve had anything notarized in Louisiana you know that it normally costs $15 to $25.  Here in Iowa at the PostNet it was only $8.  I like that and I really like the nice ladies, Dana and Andrea, who were our witnesses today.  Thanks for being our Good Samaritans today!

We road around Mason City and Forest City today and came across a bunch of cars parked along both sides of the road in front of the Forest City Cow Palace with a crowd of people standing around outside the cow palace.  We parked and walked over to the crowd. It soon became apparent that they were having a farm equipment auction.  We watched an old tractor being auctioned and head the auctioneer doing his thing which was fascinating.  After that was sold they went over to some farm gates and started bidding. It was an interesting event to see but we weren’t going to buy anything so we didn’t stay too long.

The Winnebago factory is a big thing here and there is even a Winnebago River.  We saw that there is a swinging bridge across the river and stopped to check it out.  We don’t know the story behind this but every board on the bridge was engraved with someone’s name or In Memory Of someone.   I hope you can make out some of the names in the pictures.  The bridge lead to a beautiful golf course.  I’m normally a real scaredy cat about swinging bridges but I sucked it up and was a big girl today and Roy was very proud of how brave I was!!

Even though we didn’t plan to be in Forest City but a couple of hours I’m glad we are. staying the weekend

We drove around town  and saw these neat house representative of local houses here and neat painting on the side of one of the businesses.

Tomorrow we’ll go to church at First Baptist Church of Forest City and hope we get to see the Saints on TV and maybe look around the area more.

Ya’ll come back now, ya’ hear!