The beautiful countryside of Iowa.
The grand town hall.
Ben on the Field of Dreams.
Remember Kevin Costner in
Field of Dreams? Well, Ben has his baseball suit on, bat in hand and he's ready to show us how it's done.
Iowa is the 30th most populous state in the US. It gets its name from an Indian tribe and the 99 counties are home to almost three million people. The state has 100,000 farms and provides much of the country's food, growing enormous quantities of soybean, corn, feed grain and breeding hogs, beef, sheep, turkeys, eggs and dairy products.
Dyersville, Iowa is where Field of Dreams was filmed. Kevin Costner played a corn farmer who heard a voice telling him to build a baseball field. He ploughed through his income-making corn crop and made a baseball diamond, complete with grandstand and lighting. Eventually he recognised the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson on the field, a professional player who was banned for life after the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
The Field of Dreams is still there and is open to the public. Anyone can visit free of charge and hit a few balls.
Madison County has a population of about 10,000 and was named after the fourth President of the US. In the late 1800s there were 19 covered bridges in the county, today only six remain. They are national treasures covered by the National Register of Historic Places. Cedar Bridge is the only one you can drive across these days. The bridges became famous in the Robert James Waller book, The Bridges of Madison County, which was made into a film starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.
John Wayne was born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa in 1907. His modest family home has been restored to its 1907 appearance and has lots of memorabilia from some of the Duke's 170 plus films. The town was to be called Summerset, but it was so cold on the naming day it was changed to Winterset!
