re: Iowa/Illinois/Missouri Suggestions

As far as Des Moines: best restaurants are Zombie Burger, Fong's Pizza (get the Crab Rangoon Pizza and do a kamikaze shot), and Buzzard Billy's or Flying Mango are your best shots at food from back home (but neither are great). Jethro's is a BBQ place that was featured on Man vs. Food because they have this huge sandwich challenge.

There are a bunch of local breweries in town: Confluence, 515, Firetrucker, Madhouse, Exile, Court Avenue. But if you want to try them all and a bunch of others, look up El Bait Shop...they have 185+ beers on tap.

Almost all of these breweries are off of a bike trail. One thing that Iowans and especially Des Moines love is biking...the whole city and surrounding areas are all connected with paved bike trails. Have you heard of RAGBRAI? It's a week-long bike ride across the entire state of Iowa with big parties at every stop. The host cities of every stop change each year so the cities go all out.

There's also a yearly Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival which is a lot of fun...a day long event with all you can eat bacon, drink beer, they have live music and contests, etc.

As far as outdoors stuff, the Maqueoketa Caves state park is supposed to be really pretty. There's also LeClaire, a cool small town on the Mississippi that does riverboat tours and has a brewery, etc. They actually have one of the original Baton Rouge ferry boats there and had a celebration for it a few weeks back LINK