Yesterday, we took a road trip.  My hope was to find the grave of my grandfather, Robert D. Williams and grandmother Nancy J. Williams.  The last place that he'd lived (according to the information I had) was in Beaver, Iowa.  

Well ... there is Beaver, Boone County, Iowa and Beaver Township, Guthrie County, Iowa.  

We headed for Beaver first because it is near Payton where my wife's first husband is buried.  She wanted to visit his and his grandmother's graves.  I took pics of that.

  

Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of the rest of the trip.

From Payton, we went to Beaver.  The town is so small (population 48 in 2010) that it doesn't have a bar.  The only business that we saw was the grain silos at the CoOp.

We called my sister.  She actually knew my grandparents, who had died before I was born.  She said that Nancy was buried in Missouri and Robert was buried in Silver City, Iowa.

Hmmmm.

Well, I checked the GPS and Beaver Township was closer than Silver City, so we decided to find Beaver Township.  We could not find it on a map but according to the Web, it was somewhere north of Menlo, Iowa.  So off we went.

We never found it.  But it was a nice drive down some dusty back roads into some beautiful rolling countrysides.  For miles and miles the only people we saw were cows.   And then for miles and miles there weren't even any cows.

We also discovered that Iowa's road crews are very busy this time of year.  Many of the two lane roads we took were down to one lane and we had to wait for a 'pilot vehicle' to lead us through the construction.

Since we couldn't find Beaver Township we now headed toward Silver City.  We stopped in Jefferson and had lunch at the Pizza Ranch.  While we were there we heard the bells (actually a carillon) chiming out a tune.

When we arrived in Silver City (population 245 in 2010) we found a mechanics garage that was open and stopped to ask directions to the cemetery.  Ella and I walked through the graves (there are more people dead in Silver City than live there) and did not find Robert.  I had noticed a sign for an ice cream shop so we went back into town to cool off.  I told the proprietor why were in town and that we hadn't been able to find the grave.  He suggested we stop at City Hall, which was only a half block away.  (the whole 'business section' was only two blocks long.)

After our shakes (they didn't have malts "'cause my order hasn't come in yet."), and paid in cash (even though there was a sign on the door that said they took Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, "I ordered the machine but she aint delivered it yet.") we went to City Hall but found it was closed because the clerk only works part time.
We wound our way back north and east until we found the Interstate (which was down to two lanes because of construction) and arrived home about twelve hours after we left.

So, we did not find the graves of my grandparent, but, all in all, we had a nice drive on a nice day and saw a lot of the country side.

I figured that if we'd driven the same distance in a (more or less) straight line down Interstate 35 we'd have been somewhere in mid Kansas at the end of the day.  Maybe this was a practice run for our trip to Texas this fall.