Part 4 here
After a long drive yesterday we decided to sleep a little bit longer than usual. But still, we have five hours of road in front of us so we need to hurry up. After breakfast and packing we sat in the Tundra and drove to Iowa.
There are miles of road works on the highway that we need to drive on, so we constantly used a detour. Every time we left the main road our GPS started to complain and tried to move us back but we continued to use detour signs. Unfortunately, that all took a lot of time so we came to the place that we were heading close to the end of the work day. Today our goal is Matchstick Marvels – the museum where everything is made out of matchsticks.
Matchsticks that are used for modeling
Patrick Acton is the author of all models. Being a child, he saw a story about a man who fashioned a model of his farmstead from ordinary wooden matchsticks. That stacked in his mind but it was years later – after he finished the college – when he attempted to build himself. Then he went to the store, bought a box of Ohio Blue Tip Company matchsticks, a bottle of the school glue, a universal knife and sandpaper and started to build his first model, the country church. Soon after that Acton created a matchstick model of a ship, the frigate USS Constitution. Before using the matchsticks in the work, Patrick needed to remove the sulfur tips and he did it for nearly ten years. Once Acton contacted with Ohio Blue Tip Company and learned that matchsticks could be bought without the sulfur tip. After that discovery, Patrick Acton was able to work much faster and his models now contains of hundreds of thousands of matchsticks.
In the beginning it was only a wintertime hobby and his main income was from being professional career councilor at the community college district. Now he is retired and makes matchstick models full-time. Through the all years he’s built, Acton has developed several techniques that help him create curves, shapes and more complex and detailed models. Originally to make curve he cut the matchstick into tiny pieces. Now Patrick Acton uses needle-nosed pliers to bend matchstick, without using water or steam. After bending, matchstick is glued into place, and it can be sanded a little bit with no noticeable trace of damage to the matchstick.
We walked inside the museum almost speechless and trying to keep our jaws in place because they constantly aimed to drop. It’s so hard to imagine all that tremendous efforts to build those scaled models out of ordinary matchsticks. 
Scaled mansion of Iowa Governer
Cutty Sark
The Conestoga
American bald eagle
AH-64A Apache
Aircraft carrier Nimitz
SR-71 Blackbird
United States Capitol
Space shuttle Challenger
Notre Dame de Paris
Two-headed dragon with motion detector
It can move it’s wings
Patrick Acton – the author of all models
After a lot of time spending in the museum, marveling at the wooden wonders and talking with Patrick Acton, we made ourselves to leave that beautiful place. It is time to go now. Kate decided to ride the slide once before we left, though.
Late evening we came to Minnesota.
Part 6 here