The second day of our trip the first thing we did was check out some vintage stores near our hotel. We went into a vintage costume rental store that was kinda fun to look at and then checked out a vintage/antique store across the street. The vintage/antique store had a lot of cool stuff from a variety of eras.

Heywood Wakefield dresser, swoon

Cathrineholm fondue set that was too expensive for moi.

this old pool hall ball rack was pretty cool

Cool signs and glove display hands.

Barbie and Bakelite

This french bulldog statue was super cute

Scary or cool? you decide

The Rocket shaped candy/toy dispenser was pretty awesome.

What up Ronald?

The best part for me was that the whole upstairs of the shop was a Mid Century Modern wonderland. Ugh I just wanted to take everything in that room. The store was nice but the prices were a bit high. My mom ended up buying a cool Mexican necklace but that was about it.

Mod/Atomic chair

Eames chairs and other mid century delights

Cool ball chair ( I so want an egg/ball chair you have no idea) and to the left are those cool planter chairs that i’m also obsessed with.

Heywood Wakefield table and chairs as well as part of a Barcelona chair

If you look on the top right of this photo those orange and yellow sphere things are cool retro pool floats. One is a chair and  the other a floating table thing. So cool.

After the vintage shops we went to the Des Moines botanical garden which was just ok aside from the very cool water lilies they had in their water garden, they were definitely the highlight of the gardens. Our favorites were the big round ones that kind of looked like trays. But it was also cool to see the others as well, some of them had shower head like stigma ( I think that’s the right word) which was kinda freaky but also pretty cool.

these were our favorites. Someone should totally make a tray that looks like that it would be so awesome.

After the botanical garden we went to the Robert D. Ray Chinese Gardens. The gardens were built by a Chinese immigrant association to honor a longtime Iowa governor, Robert D. Ray, who did a lot to help bring different immigrant and refugee groups to Iowa. The building and gardens were beautiful as was the skyline and scenery around it.

I also went a bit on a the modern arch bridge you can see in the Chinese garden pictures. It split into two and got wider in the middle and then re-connects on both ends. It was nice bridge with a pretty view.

We checked out some thrift stores later on that day but we didn’t find anything good and the prices there were also pretty high. After two stores we didn’t really have the motivation to check any others out. But if you’re a Des Moines-ian and you are a vintage collector/thrifter let me know where you go, I’m curious.

After the thrifts we were pretty much beat  so we had dinner and  didn’t do much of anything else that day.