Much More Than DutchNorthwest Iowa offers diverse dining, sight-seeing and cultural experiences

By Tamara Fynaardt

If you missed Orange City’s annual Tulip Festival, there are still good reasons to visit northwest Iowa. When you join us for Homecoming—or take your kids to visit your alma mater—you can browse Dutch-fronted shops, visit windmill replicas along a miniature canal, and play 18 holes among native prairie grasses at Landsmeer Golf Club. You can also taste alligator, buy jewelry from Peru, and explore a geological wonder.

Shop

After stocking up on Raider-wear from the Northwestern Bookstore, you can wander off campus to buy tulip bulbs, wooden shoes or Woudstra bratwurst. Among Orange City’s shops like the Dove Christian Bookstore and Old Wagon Wheel Antiques is one where buying is a way to give back.

Hands Around the World

In the middle of our Dutch downtown, Hands Around the World celebrates the global neighborhood by selling the fair-trade handiwork of artisans in more than 30 developing countries, including Haiti. Friendly volunteer shopkeepers share stories of craftspeople who’ve fashioned the jewelry, tableware, linens, nativity sets, musical instruments and more that fill the store. Proceeds enable the artisans—including women who have no other way to earn a living—to feed and house their families and educate their children.

Play

Orange City-area recreation includes Holland Plaza Theatres, Windmill Park, and Kinderspeelland, where parents can chase their children up ladders, across bridges and through tunnels ill-sized for adults. If you come for Homecoming in October, you can also look for the Great Pumpkin.

Pumpkinland
pumpkinlandiowa.com

Located just three miles north of Orange City, Pumpkinland is on the family farm of Helen and Dave Huitink ’71, also known to area children as “Grandma and Grandpa Pumpkin.” In addition to a pick-your-own pumpkin, you can also go home with gourds, ornamental corn, and squash from a selection of 35 varieties. After visiting Animal-land—with kittens, puppies, bunnies, peacocks, ponies, llamas and more—you might lose the kids for awhile in the seven-acre corn maze.

Eat

If thinking of Orange City makes you crave poffertjes and fudge puppies, you’ll have to wait until the tulips are blooming. Until then, there’s still plenty to satisfy your appetite, including Pizza Ranch’s “Roundup” with Blue Bunny’s “Peanut Butter Panic” ice cream for dessert.  Other area restaurants offer one-of-a-kind dining experiences.

Old Factory Coffee Shop
View vintage wooden shoe-making machinery while you wait for your gourmet coffee, brewed to order one cup at a time by owners Rola and Richard Sowienski. The historic Orange City landmark is just a walk away from Northwestern’s campus, where Richard—a former editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine—teaches creative writing.

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Blue Mountain Culinary Emporium
bluemountainemporium.net

The Blue Mountain Culinary Emporium is named for proprietors Deb and Clayton ’87 Korver’s beloved Blue Mountains of Jamaica. In addition to The Barn, a restored post-and-beam Iowa barn that is part art gallery, part reception hall, the emporium includes three distinct dining experiences:

Unwind in front of the fire in the Blue Mountain Lodge. Your kids will gape at the wild game trophies while they enjoy house-made root beer and hotdogs. You can wash down your “Jalapeño Papa” burger—fired over hardwood charcoal—with a Blue Mountain Brew made with locally grown raspberries, rhubarb, black walnuts or toasted pumpkin seeds.

Or leave the kids with a sitter and escape to the Passport Club, where they serve both exotic and home-grown appetizers like gator remoulade and fried green tomatoes. Pop the cork on a rare vintage from Passport’s 1,300-bottle wine cellar. Large gathering or nook-and-cranny private seating is surrounded by the Korvers’ museum-quality art, artifacts and antiques from six continents—including fossilized trilobites from prehistoric Africa and a Tibetan drum large enough to serve as a table for eight.

After an appetizer, head downstairs to the Smokehouse Grille for Northern Plains Cuisine™, including wood-fired pizza or an award-winning rack of ribs, slow-smoked over apple wood. Side dishes are grown in Blue Mountain’s own garden and greenhouse. The Grille, also housed in a restored Iowa barn, offers cozy booths in an Americana atmosphere, a European-style conservatory, or a garden piazza for alfresco dining.

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Archie’s Waeside
archieswaeside.com

Archie’s Waeside in nearby Le Mars was judged the best steakhouse in the Midwest by Rachael Ray during her 2009 “Search for the Great American Steakhouse.” Roadfood.com’s Michael Stern rated it “worth driving from anyplace” and described his hand-cut, dry-aged ribeye entrée as “deliriously succulent.” If you visit Archie’s, you may wonder if you’re in the right place when you drive up to the low-slung, unpretentious building. But if the spacious parking lot is full—even on a weeknight—you’ve found it.

Explore

A walk in the woods is as close as the Puddle Jumper Trail between Orange City and Alton. If you’re game for roaming farther, a trip to Sioux City will enable you to follow the trail of Lewis and Clark or wander along the ridge of an uncommon landform.

Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center
siouxcitylcic.com

The only member to die on Lewis and Clark’s expedition from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean did so in what is now Sioux City, Iowa. Listen to animatronic Lewis and Clark tell the harrowing story of Sergeant Charles Floyd’s death by appendicitis—and other memorable moments from their journey—at at Sioux City’s Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center along the Missouri River. The center, with its interactive exhibits, is surrounded by gardens of plants that were among Lewis and Clark’s species discoveries, such as curlycup gumweed and buffaloberry.

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Loess Hills
visitloesshills.com

The Loess Hills along Iowa’s western border run from north of Sioux City down to near St. Joseph, Mo. Visitors can drive the 200-mile Loess Hills Scenic Byway or explore the geology and wildlife around Sioux City at Stone State Park, which includes the Dorothy Pecaut Nature Center. The nature center has a “walk-under” prairie and children’s discovery area with touchable furs, antlers, fossils and other artifacts. Loess (pronounced “luss”) is soil that’s been ground fine as flour during an ice age and blown into dune-like hills. Loess deposits can be found elsewhere in the U.S., but the one between Iowa and Nebraska is the largest. And to find higher loess hills than Iowa’s, you’d have to travel to China.