Hi Kate! Hi Mrs. DiFrederic’s class!
Thanks so much for
sending me to Ames, Iowa to visit the York family. I had a super fun time and learned a lot about Iowa while I
was there. I hope you enjoy learning
about Iowa too!
Here I am on a map of the
United States. Maine is all the
way in the northeast corner of the country and has an ocean border with
coastline. The state of Maine is
yellow on this map with a picture of a lighthouse, can you see it? I am pointing to Iowa here. Iowa is right in the middle of the
country with no ocean borders, but there are rivers to both the east
(Mississippi River) and west (Missouri River) of the state. The state of Iowa is red on this map
with a picture of a pig, can you see it?
Bangor, Maine and Ames,
Iowa are 1,600 miles apart. If you
got in your car and drove without stopping it would take you 26 hours. That is more than one whole day!
Ames, Iowa is almost
exactly in the center of the state.
This is Lucy and Jamie in
front of their house in Ames. The
houses in Iowa look a lot like the houses in Maine, but one difference is that
almost all the roads are completely straight. There are very few turns and curves.
You can see there is snow
on the ground right now. Iowa does
get cold and it does get snow, but the winter comes later and is shorter. Iowa doesn’t get nearly as much snow as
Maine does, especially this winter.
Iowa is on the
plains. It is flat here with not a
lot of trees. Flat means it is
very windy a lot of the time!
And windy means wind
power. There are windmills all
over the place in Iowa. Lucy and
Jamie’s mommy works at a school that gets electricity from two windmills. I visited the windmill at the school,
but it’s not nearly as big as most of the windmills. I wish I had gotten to see a wind farm, where there are 100
windmills or more, but the wind farms are far away from Ames and we didn’t
visit one. The windmill here is
over 100 feet tall, even though I look taller than it in the picture!
Most of the flat open spaces
in Iowa are used to grow corn or soybeans. Farming is very important to people here and there are a lot
of jobs on farms or with farm products.
People also raise pigs, cows, and chickens for meat, milk, and
eggs. Do you know what a corn silo
looks like? They are very modern!
These are silos. Most of the farms are very large. Corn is stored in silos because the
corn grown here is mostly not for people to eat. It is grown to feed animals or make ethanol. Do you know what ethanol is? It’s super silly: Ethanol is gas for
your car that is made from corn!
This is the ethanol
factory. There is a tractor
trailer truck with a tanker trailer that is full of ethanol ready to bring to a
gas station.
There are a lot of farm
equipment stores around Ames. I
visited on with Lucy and got to sit in a tractor!
This is me on a tractor. You can see how big the tractor is
compared to me. There are also
tractors that are called combines that are even bigger, and used to harvest
corn. Some combines cost over
$1,000,000. That’s a lot of money!
The tractors were a lot
of fun to see.
In Iowa and all over the
midwest, the states on the plains in the middle of the country, water towers
are important town landmarks. They
are very tall and you can see them from miles away. Every town has its own water tower, and people in the town
are very proud of them and how they look.
Sometimes they have special designs that show visitors something about
the town.
Ames has one kind of
water tower:
And the water tower at
Iowa State University looks different too:
Iowa State University is
in Ames, where I visited. It’s
like the University of Maine but way bigger. In fact, there are almost as many students at Iowa State
University as there are in Bangor, Maine.
About 30,000!
The mascot for the university is the Cyclone, or
Cy the cardinal (bird). A cyclone
is also called a tornado and there are tornados in Iowa sometimes. This picture is at the entrance to Iowa
State University and the sculpture next to me is supposed to look like a
cyclone.
College football is very
important to people here. People
are very excited about games and lots of people wear t-shirts to show they are
fans of Iowa State University. The
football stadium is named Jack Trice Stadium and can hold up to 55,000
people. That’s way more people
than live in Bangor, Maine! Ames
gets very crowded when there are football games at Iowa State.
Love, Flat Stanley
February 2013
