Thursday, January 15, 2009

Iowa: Trip Recap #2

It's no secret that I'm not a fan of winter.

I love a white Christmas as much as anyone. I don't mind sledding or making snow angels occasionally. But for the most part, winter means heavy coats, wet shoes, no more bike riding and tennis, and a whole lot of bad driving conditions.

I'm definitely a summer person.

It was precisely because of this aversion to cold that I had initially decided to give the Midwest a wide berth. I know winters can be cold and long here, but they are nothing to Midwest winters, with ice storms, and -30 degree wind chills, and all that. If we were leaving Utah for residency, it was going to be for some place warm, gosh darn it.

Which is why I was surprised to find myself interviewing at Iowa City, IO this last week. I was even more surprised to find that I liked it.

Don't get me wrong. It was cold. A friend of mine who lives out there now said, "You think you know what cold is out in Utah. Well, ya don't."

But the town was small, friendly, pretty, and safe. The small-town feel really appealed to me, as did the warm Midwestern people I met there. It wasn't the complete flatness that I had imagined (apparently, that's Kansas.) There were a lot of trees, rivers, and rolling, um, "hills."

I only saw it in the winter, but I heard that I can be beautiful in the summer.

Iowa City
(Courtesy of the internet)


And people kept telling me the cold could be worse. I could be in Minnesota.

No comments: