Dellit Red Dot Adventures: Winding Stairs & Matchsticks

When Brad and I were making the 20+ hour trip back to Iowa from Virginia, I was browsing through the atlas and noticed all of the red dots. They typically mark historical places or places of interest. I realized how many things I never knew were in Iowa because when we lived here before, we were busy going to school and working alot. We decided that we would spend some time traveling around and see as many of the "red dots" as we could.

Today we were going to visit Grandpa in Gladbrook. Brad saw a Matchstick Marvels museum in Gladbrook so we decided we would check it out. I also mentioned the winding stairs in Traer (which is on the way) but Brad had never heard of them.

So off we went, on our first adventure. It was so good, we told Grandpa we are taking him to the Matchstick Museum next week.

Matchstick Marvels website

Winding Stairs in Traer website




Sammy and Sophie in the back of the truck wondering what in the world we are doing.

Me and Sammy at the winding stairs

If you look closely, you can see all 4 of us at the bottom of the stairs.

A lady bug that kept flying around the truck. Apparently she was in need of an adventure, too.

Matchstick Marvels in Gladbrook. Turns out that there is one model in every Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in the country.

The Lord of the Rings castle, Minas Tirith in progress. He thinks it will be done next year. So far, there are 420,000 matchsticks

The Cutty Sark - 38,000 matchsticks

The US Capitol - 478,000 matchsticks

For all you Harry Potter fans: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry! This one was sold and is on display in Spain -- so this is only a picture.

For the rest of the picture see Facebook or Shutterfly