Fall Colors tour small, but mighty despite rain

The Fall Colors Tour traditionally is the event where Iowa Chapter members gather to drive around the Iowa countryside and enjoy the splendor and wonder that the season has to offer. The route was set, reservations made, but Iowa’s weather had something a little different in store for us.

We started the weekend at BMW of Des Moines for breakfast and then headed south to Winterset. The rain came in buckets during breakfast and just when we got to Winterset, the rain stopped. It was also the weekend of the Covered Bridge Festival, so we walked around the market for a while, and got to know our fellow travelers a bit.

From Winterset, we drove to Mount Ayr for lunch and met up with our last group of members. After Mount Ayr, we journeyed further south into Amish country and into northern Missouri, where it drizzled a bit more. Our route took us across Missouri on some very twisty county roads and across equally curvy Highway 46 toward Maryville, Missouri. As many times as I’ve been through Maryville in planning this trip, I still have no clue what a Bearcat is, other than the mascot for NW Missouri State University.

After a brief stop on the side of Highway 71 to let a thunderstorm pass, we continued onto our final destination for Saturday. In St. Joseph, Missouri, we ate a fantastically delicious dinner at Cajun restaurant Boudreaux’s in historic downtown St. Jo. Sunday morning we departed from the Drury Inn for Topeka, Kansas. Luckily the rain passed through overnight and in the early morning because the drive there was quite scenic along the southern end of the Loess Hills, and then across the river in Kansas. We ended our journey at Heartland Park Topeka, where we met up with other members that were participating in a Porsche club driving school. We arrived a tad late to do parade laps, but were able to watch the action for a while and take some pictures. At that point the group broke apart to go their separate ways home, but all agreed that it was a fabulous time, and that though the weather put a little damper of some of the driving, it was still a great event.