WATERLOO, Iowa — The ballot is in, the vote has been counted and the winner is — Paco Rosic, a Bosnian refugee and reformed graffiti artist who used 5,000 cans of spray paint to re-create the Sistine Chapel ceiling at his family’s restaurant in Waterloo.

Rosic edged out Patrick Acton, a college counselor who has built incredibly detailed models with wood matchsticks, including a 12-foot-long model of the U.S. Capitol that took 478,000 matchsticks and looks like it should have ant-sized politicians sitting inside.
While Iowa’s early presidential primary gets all the attention, I held a contest of my own with a 1,100-mile, looping road trip in search of the weirdest, wackiest, most amazing attractions the Hawkeye State had to offer.

Iowa was too big to cover in just five days, so I may have missed your favorite destination. Personally, I wanted to see where the music died, but the farm field near Clear Lake where a plane crashed in 1959 carrying Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens would have meant a half-day detour.

Still, I strolled through picture-perfect towns such as Pella, ate a banana split for breakfast at the ice cream capital of the world in Le Mars and watched a young businessman from Cincinnati knock my hanging curveball into the corn stubble beyond the Field of Dreams in Dyersville.

I also visited the birthplace of Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset and of Donnabelle Mullenger in Denison. You remember them, don’t you?

I met Paco Rosic one rainy morning in downtown Waterloo at his restaurant, appropriately called Galleria De Paco. Above the plush tables set for dinner was a ceiling covered in a glowing version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling that would have made Michelangelo proud.

Rosic, 27, explained that he was born in Sarajevo, but his family fled the Bosnian War in 1991 and settled in Germany, where he became a graffiti artist, or tagger, as a teenager. When his family immigrated to the United States in 1997, he wanted to elevate his artistic skills, but use the same medium.

Rosic saw the Sistine Chapel in an art book at the age of 6 and was hooked. When his parents turned a dilapidated antique store in Iowa into a gourmet restaurant, the barrel ceiling became his canvas. “I flew to Rome, I had to see it with my own eyes,” Rosic said. “I walked into the Sistine Chapel and it blew me away. I stood there for hours and hours.”

Returning home, he worked as long as 15 hours a day on his project, lying on an industrial scaffolding 12 feet above the ground. It took more than four months to re-create the biblical scenes with 384 characters on the restaurant ceiling. Because of the spectacular results, Rosic, now a U.S. citizen, has been commissioned for similar pro-jects, including one in Vegas.

The German founders of Burlington built Snake Alley, which Ripley’s says is the world’s crookedest street, in 1894 to get their wagons and carriages from the top of Heritage Hill down to the city’s business district. I was admiring its seven curves over 275 feet when Jackson Collins walked up.

“When I was a kid we used to drive down it one way, and then we backed up it the other — in 1948, in a ‘39 Ford,” Collins said. “They won’t let you do that kind of BS anymore.” The street attracts scofflaws. Moments later, a young man in a red sports car with the top down sped up the one-way street, the wrong way.

Fifty miles to the west, Fairfield had the only city guide in America that provided a pronunciation key and definition for the word “maharishi.” More than 30 years ago, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who became world famous as the guru to the Beatles, was looking for a place to set up a school for his followers of Transcendental Meditation when he purchased the old Parsons College in Fairfield.

This little farm town was flooded with hundreds of hippies from both coasts who were seeking a blissful life and world peace amid the cornfields of Iowa. The maharishi now lives in Holland, but nearly 1,000 of his followers still attend his Maharishi University of Management, where they meet at 5 each evening to meditate.

Eldon was a short ride from Fairfield, and a must stop because it is home to the modest white cottage Grant Wood used in his “American Gothic” painting of a somber-faced farm couple with a pitchfork. There was no one in sight except two construction workers building a visitors center across the street. Joe Miranda and Juan Ochoa agreed to pose with their ladder.

Pella, home to the window manufacturer of the same name, looked like a movie set, with a re-created Dutch village, beds of tulips everywhere and the country’s tallest working windmill. T-shirts in a shop window said, “If you’re not Dutch, you’re not much.”

After paying $1.90 for an almond-flavored pastry from the 100-year-old Jaarsma Bakery, I was in need of exercise and stopped outside of town at the Cordova Park Observation Tower, a water tower converted into the Midwest’s tallest observation tower at 118 feet.

A sign warned “ascending tower requires physical exertion” and climbing the 168 steps was, indeed, breathtaking.

I made a U-turn on Highway 14 going through Monroe to take a second look at an octagon-shaped house in need of repair. “It doesn’t get any weirder than this house and the guy who lives in it,” said Lauri Williamson, who answered the door. The owner was David Lorton, a professional buckskinner who preferred to be called Snake.

“It was built around 1865,” said Lorton, 59, who has lived in the house since he was 4. “The guy was a doctor or lawyer who had attended a seminar on pyramids and octagons and reading bumps on your head. He built it because of the vibes.”

Back on the road, Newton was next and Myrna Ver Ploeg, president of Maytag Dairy Farms, gave me a tour of the spotless facilities where the world’s most famous blue cheese is made, and aged in caves.

“We make a million pounds of cheese a year — it takes 10 pounds of milk to make a pound of cheese,” she said.

The name Maytag is also known for appliances, and the same family founded that company, which had administrative offices and production facilities employing 3,000 people at its peak in Newton. In April of 2006, Whirlpool acquired the Maytag appliance company. In May, it announced it would pull all operations out of Newton. The town is in mourning, although it still has Maytag Blue.

Des Moines presented the trip’s first setback. “The shrunken heads have been taken off display, they’re not considered politically correct,” said Edy Fudge, tour guide at the Salisbury House. “They’re still here, but I don’t know where they are. Honestly.”

I had been promised shrunken heads by the state tourism folks, but Salisbury House was pretty cool, even without the heads. Carl and Edith Weeks completed the 42-room mansion in 1928 and shopped the world for antiques to fill it. They modeled the house after a 13th-century hunting lodge in Salisbury, England.

Winterset was a success. Carolyn Wilson showed me around the tiny four-room home where Marion Robert Morrison was born on May 26, 1907. His family stayed in town only three more years, and Marion became better known as John Wayne.

“He weighed 13 pounds, it was a difficult birth,” Wilson said. “Our saying here is: He came into the world big, and went out big.”

The gift shop sold a black T-shirt that said “The Duke” for $18, and the memorabilia in the home included an eye patch Wayne wore in “True Grit.” The town held a major event in May to celebrate the late actor’s birthday and to raise funds for a new museum.

Imagine. John Wayne would have been 100 years old this year.

Wilson also gave me a map to find the six covered bridges made famous by the book, and later the movie, titled “The Bridges of Madison County.” The movie, which came out in 1995, starred Clint Eastwood as a photographer and Meryl Streep as a naughty farmer’s wife.

It was like a treasure hunt heading over the back roads, but I found all six red bridges. There was no bored farmer’s wife hanging around, just a guy looking for treasures of his own with a metal detector.

Lunch was at the Northside Cafe, where Eastwood ate in the movie. I was wolfing down an excellent Philly cheese steak sandwich when a tour group of ladies came in and asked which stool Eastwood sat on. They took turns patting the stool, reverently. “I’d rather pat his buns,” said Sheryl Funderburg of Bethany, Okla.

Albert, the world’s largest bull, graced a park in Audubon, where he was built by the local Jaycees in 1964 to honor the state’s beef industry. The 45-ton concrete sculpture of a Hereford was anatomically correct, from his thick eyelashes to his hoofs and everything in between.

Denison was the birthplace of Donnabelle Mullenger, who was known as Donna Reed when she won an Oscar in 1953 for her portrayal of a prostitute in “From Here to Eternity,” quite a role reversal for an actress who built a career on her wholesome image. Donna had a lifelong affection for the town, and the golden statue now has a place of honor on the mantel of the Crawford County historical museum.

Le Mars marked the western end of my journey, and I stopped long enough to investigate its claim as the “Ice Cream Capital of the World.” Sure enough, the town is home to Wells Dairy, which makes more ice cream — nearly 120 million gallons a year, most of it under the Blue Bunny name — in one location than any other company. Fred Wells founded the company in 1913 with a borrowed $250.

I was in the home stretch now and blew by the world’s largest popcorn ball, displayed in a red shed with a picture window in Sac City. The 3,100-pound behemoth was made by 40 volunteers at the Noble Popcorn Farm in 2004 and certified by Guinness as the planet’s biggest. A giant can of Coke stood nearby to wash it down.

The tour came to a screaming halt in Gladbrook when I walked into the Matchstick Marvels and saw the incredible work of Patrick Acton. “The first thing people say when they walk in the door is — ‘I didn’t expect them to be this big,“’ said Esther Jindrich, who was collecting the $3 admission. She was talking about the battleships, space shuttles, capital buildings and other works Acton built by gluing together wood matchsticks, minus the heads. Ripley’s can’t believe it either; the firm has purchased 15 of the marvels for its museums.

Acton, 54, “started doing this from boredom on a cold winter afternoon,” Jindrich said. “It takes him up to three years to make one, and lots of glue. We don’t talk about patience.”

After my visit with Paco Rosic, the aerosol artist, I headed east to Dyersville, which has a trifecta of attractions: the twin-spired St. Francis Xavier Basilica, the most beautiful church on my loop; the National Farm Toy Museum, which has 30,000 toys and trucks on display; and the Field of Dreams, the baseball diamond that starred in the 1989 movie of the same name.

I didn’t see any ghosts on the diamond, only Craig Beachler, who had a bat, two gloves and a bag of balls. Beachler, 32, and wearing a Cincinnati Reds cap, said he was moving to Oregon, and made a pilgrimage to the field. “This was a few hours out of the way, but I grew up with this movie — it gives me chills,” he said. “Got a good arm on you?”

I took the mound, and he dusted off home plate. After a few long fouls, he zeroed in and hit my slow-motion curveball over the green expanse of left field into the cornfield stubble beyond. Beachler left for Oregon smiling; my arm ached for two days.

The Fenelon Place Elevator in Dubuque says it is the world’s shortest, steepest scenic railway, heading 189 feet up on a rail 296 feet in length to a platform that offers a panoramic view of three states. Isabel Trumbauer, 87, was a lifelong resident of the Dubuque area, but making her first ascent.

“I used to beg my mother to take me, but she was scared to death,” said Trumbauer, who was with her three daughters. “It’s kind of like being in a helicopter, although I’ve never been in one of those, either.”

Tom Uhlenbrock is a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

IF YOU GO:

Fairfield: www.fairfieldiowa.com. Maharishi University of Management is www.mum.edu. The Raj Health Spa is www.theraj.com and the Rukmapura Park Hotel is 1-866-472-1008 and www.rukmapura.com.

Pella: 1-641-628-2409 and www.pella.org. There is an admission charge to the windmill and historical village.

Maytag Farms in Newton: 1-800-247-2458 and www.maytagblue.com. Blue cheese is sold to visitors to the farm, and a closed-circuit system was being set up this summer to allow guests to watch as blue cheese is made. Cheese also can be obtained by mail order.

Salisbury House in Des Moines: 1-515-274-1777 and www.salisburyhouse.org. Admission is $7 for adults and $3 for children, 6-12. The house is closed in January and February.

John Wayne Birthplace at Winterset: 1-515-462-1044 and www.johnwaynebirthplace.org. Admission is $3 for adults and $1 for children. Guided tours are given daily from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Bridges of Madison County: The Chamber of Commerce has maps at 1-800-298-6119 and www.madisoncounty.com.

Donna Reed Center in Denison: 1-712-263-3334 and www.donnareed.org.

Wells Dairy in Le Mars: 1-712-546-4090 and www.wellsdairy.com. The visitor center has a museum (admission is $3 for adults and $1 for children), a gift shop and an ice cream parlor.

Matchstick Marvels in Gladbrook: 1-888-473-3456 and www.matchstickmarvels.com. Open 1-5 p.m. daily, April through November. Then by appointment. Admission $3 for adults, $1 for children, 5-12.

Galleria De Paco in Waterloo: 1-319-833-7226 and www.paco-rosic.com. Group tours are available of other works by Paco Rosic in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls area.

National Toy Museum in Dyersville: 1-563-875-2727 and www.nationalfarmtoymuseum.com. Open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. Admission is $4 for adults and $2 for children, 6-12.

Field of Dreams in Dyersville: 1-888-875-8404 and www.fodmoviesite.com. Open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., April through November. There are no organized activities, but you can bring your own gear and play on the field for free. Ghost players appear at noon on the last Sunday of each month, June through September.

Breitbach’s Restaurant in Balltown: 1-563-552-2220 and balltown@aol.com.

Fenelon Place Elevator Co. in Dubuque: 1-563-582-6496 and www.dbq.com/fenplco/. The charge to ride is $2 round trip, or $1 one way, for adults, and $1 or 50 cents for children. Open April through November.

The Machine Shed in Davenport: At 7250 Northwest Boulevard, and www.machineshed.com.

For more on Iowa: 1-800-345-4692 and www.traveliowa.com.

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