Quadriceps, Quadrilaterals, Quadratic Equations? No, it's time for Quad Cities, Iowa!

 "And the whole town said that he should have used red, but it looked good to Charlene. In John Deere Green" - Joe Diffie

We were scheduled to arrive in Quad Cities, Iowa at 8:30AM but were slightly delayed by river traffic. 

An easy breakfast from The River Cafe

We passed the time between breakfast and our tour by checking out the game selection in The Living Room and watching the crew practice drills.

Most of the tour options for today were in the morning. If you were feeling fit and adventurous, you could start your day with a moderate activity, two and a 1/2 hours guided bike tour along the Great River Road National Scenic Byway. This was an extra cost (aka optional) excursion.

For more of a taste of small town America, you could spend three and 1/2 hours visiting Cinnamon Ridge, a family run Midwestern farm. After a Q&A session, barn tour, and milking machinery demonstration, you could enjoy a cheese tasting paired with local beers and wines. This is also an extra cost excursion.

If you were feeling like you needed some more culture in your life, then a visit to the Figge Art Museum could be right up your alley. This two and 1/2 hour long easy tour focuses on artist Grant Wood (best known for painting "American Gothic") and includes privileged access to viewing Wood's archived belongings and works on paper.

If science and natural history was more your kind of museum, you could visit the Putnam Museum. This museum visit would focus on their Native American and Midwest collections on a privileged access tour led by Putnam's Curator of History and Anthropology. The guided tour concludes with unique performances, lectures, and craft demonstrations celebrating Indigenous Americans.

The one tour that had both a morning and afternoon session was the one covering what the town is most known for, the founding of the John Deere company. This included excursion lasts three hours and 15 minutes and involves visiting the Deere family homes and the John Deere Pavilion. The Pavilion is a museum full of hands on products and displays of the company's products that you are welcome to climb into and onto. Two tour bus groups went on the morning tour and only one bus full was booked on the afternoon tour. 

The website description lists the schedule for this tour as visiting one of the Deere family homes and the Pavilion. Tim had explained during the shore excursion talk that they'd stagger the groups so half of us would visit the house while the other half visited the Pavilion. Due to the traffic that delayed the start of the morning tour, we both were at Deere family houses at overlapping times. We also ended up visiting both of the family houses when the description only lists one. Both houses had long winded guides and by the end of our time at the second house, there was a lot of us getting overheated and bored. Our excursion guide finally interrupted to tell the second house guide that we needed to move on so we could have time at the Pavillion. Once we arrived at the Pavillion, our excursion guide announced that we'd have a whole 20 minutes here because he promised Viking we'd be back by 2:45PM. 

As we were finally leaving the houses, the tour guide walks over to me and says, "Well did you at least learn something?!" I've always looked younger than I am and I was certainly the youngest in our tour group but that remark and tone he used was more like he thought he was talking to a teen who was being unwillingly dragged to a museum by their parents. Guess my brain forgot to tell my face to keep quiet.

Above: The Kimball Organ 

Below: The inner mechanics for the Kimball Organ

This was very frustrating when you unleash 45 kids at heart into a pavillion and only give them 20 minutes to run around and climb into everything and get pictures taken. And that's on top of the venue being open to the public in late summer so you're fighting families with kids running around. 

While I understand that river traffic delays are unavoidable, I think there were a few other options Viking could have done to make things better. One is to only visit one of the two houses and/or stick to a schedule not letting the museum guide talk for hours. Two is to give people the option of going to the houses or the pavilion so we could have as much time as we wanted at a place we preferred. Lastly, combine the morning and afternoon tours so that the afternoon tour wasn't pressed for time. I'd rather be a little more crowded at the house tour than optimal if it meant having as much time as the morning tour did to enjoy the Pavilion. This was the included tour option so there's no money to refund if someone feels they missed out by only going to one venue. The buses were Viking's own coaches so there was no issue getting extra transportation on the spot. Those of us on the afternoon tour were literally being yelled at and herded back on board so the ship could leave like we were some sort of late pier runners.

Today was the tour that got us back during what should have been the "Coffee & Snacks (Pizza)" time frame for The River Cafe. We went straight to the cafe ready to eat whatever they had available as we were starving. Instead we found them shut down. When we asked them to provide something for our tour that just came back, the crew said "Sorry, there's nothing available because our boss told us to always shut down by 2PM." Soon the cafe is filled with the rest of our tour group and the crew is having to apologize for the wait while they make more food since they'd only just got the call about the tour group coming back late. Funny, I feel like they heard that from somewhere else first. They started whipping out pizzas as fast as passengers were filling their plates. Another crew member who is usually the bartender swooped in to reopen the ice cream so there was at least one other option.

Maybe don't print it on the back of every Viking Daily if you're not going to stick to those hours?

Feeling a little less hangry after the pizza, we attended the Majority Rules game show run by Tim and his Assistant Cruise Director Olivia. We've attended this game on many cruises and it's always good for a laugh. Tim announced during the game that Olivia had the best answer for the pick up line question because she had met her now husband while they both were working on board. Her pick up line to him was "Want to see an officer's cabin?"

Dinner tonight was heavy on the protein with ribs and pulled pork balanced by mashed potatoes and corn on the cob.

Our onboard lecturer Gabby gave a talk tonight about the Great American Steamboat Race. We ended the evening with another fun round of The Big Quiz trivia with Cruise Director Tim.