Saturday in Davenport

We slept pretty well....the motel is really quiet. I treated Gene to the free breakfast at the motel. He was impressed. Next we stopped at the local Harley-Davidson dealer and looked at the various models they had.

We decided to go to the Putnam museum in Davenport to see the IMAX movie "Mystery of the Nile" . This is a documentary of a team of modern-day explorers rafting down the Blue Nile from Ethiopia all the way to Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea. This was the first successful raft trip from the source at Lake Tana to the sea. This is a good IMAX film if you get a chance to see it. The section on Ethiopia was really interesting.

You can see a sneak preview at ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcqPFv1SoCw

While we were at the Putnam Museum we went to see the motorcycle exhibit. They have about two dozen old motorcycles dating from around 1910 up to the 1950s. They had some WW-II motorcycles and some like those I saw in New Mexico (Excelsiors and Indians) plus a few others. There was a special exhibit on women and motorcycles. Some of the old photographs were interesting.

We had a couple beers and some cheeseburgers at a sports bar down on the river front. The women's diving competition was on the TV and we developed our own scoring system that was somewhat unrelated to the diving. We don't know much about diving. Ours was based on wedgies.... you sort of had to be there

Next stop was the minor league baseball game. This was the Quad Cities River Bandits vs. the Burlington Bees. The score was tied up for most of the game but the Bees pulled ahead and eventually won 6 to 4. The ballpark was nice and they had a good crowd. We had good seats just behind home plate. There was a special give-away...McCain or Obama Bobble-Head dolls and you could pick your candidate. Obama won. Gene and I got selected to be interviewed for the local newspaper...I guess just because we looked so cool with our bobbleheads.

The downtown part of Davenport was seriously flooded just a few months ago and the ballpark was sort of an island. Water was well up into the First Street buildings in many places.

They had a fireworks show after the game so we watched that and then went back to the First Street Brewery and watched Michael Phelps win his eighth Olympic swimming gold medal. The whole place was glued to the TV. After that we headed back to the motel and ended the day. Tomorrow we head back home.