I have been putting off blogging about my Midwest vacation, it’s just too much to think about. Too many photos, too many scraps of paper with sales or thrift store notes scribbled on them. This was way bigger than Texas as far as the sheer volume of places that I went to.

I was going to try and blog in chronological order, but that started to overwhelm me. The solution (if you can call it that) is to just slowly tackle a state at a time.

So I’ll start with the Lakes area of Iowa – covering Spirit Lake, Okoboji, Spencer, Milford and Esterville. As far as I can tell there aren’t really any thrift stores in this area, with the exception of a crappy Goodwill in Spencer that was mostly filled with cast-offs from Walmart and Old Navy.

There are 27 different antique shops in this area and I was able to hit about half of those, some very overpriced. The Okoboji Antique Mall has higher prices than Ebay! This is Iowa, right? They did have this awesome Tidy Teddy parks sign that I thought was pretty great.

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One antique mall in downtown Spirit Lake (Red Door Antiques) had a fly swatter for sale – WTF?

They did have Bakelite-handled flatware for dirt cheap, so I guess that was an okay trade-off.

There seemed to be no real middle ground. Most places were either super high end …

… or super low end.

I purchased some vintage Fiestaware for 3 bucks a plate at a place called the 6th Street Emporium in Estherville that was far more large-scale thrift store than antique shop. They did have the largest selection of bridesmaids dresses and shoes that I have ever seen in one place.

Here is an insanely long list of antique stores in Iowa in case you are headed out that way for some reason.