Finally, just a normal week

I guess you can say that things got back to normal just a bit this week, given the unusual weather events of the past several weeks.  We had visitors this week (Chuck and Lorraine, who we'd met in Quartzsite), we got in a good bike ride on Wednesday, including some hills, and attended the annual Des Moines Arts Festival on Saturday.
The strange weather isn't entirely over yet, as several inches of rain (and a bit of hail) came our way on Thursday morning -- pushing the first six months of this year into the record book here -- something like 15 and a half inches.  Thursday is our day off, so we had a pretty soggy day for the most part.
Chuck and Lorraine visited the four of us here this week, and we were able to have a good time with Mark and Sue fixing some crawfish etouffe one night, a couple of drinks and laughs here and there, and also giving us an excuse to get together for a potluck BBQ, along with Bob and Vicki.  As you can see, we didn't let this week's marginal weather get us down.

 
 
On Wednesday, our fellow RAGBRAI-er Chuck took us on a section of the Raccoon River Trail about 50 miles west of the Des Moines area, where he promised we'd get some hill work in -- and he was right.  The trail is fairly level, but he took us on some side diversions where we got at least 1500-2000 feet of elevation gain and loss, which was the riding component we'd been missing in our RAGBRAI preparation. 
Along the way we ran into a biking buddy of his -- Dan -- who had recently ridden the first two days of this year's RAGBRAI route with Brian Duffy, the Des Moines Register's cartoonist who is blogging this year's ride.  Dan particularly mentioned the route on day two, which is 83 miles long, and has almost 5000 feet of elevation gain -- as something to really prepare for.  He referred us to a particular set of hills at Springbrook State Park (where we were heading) as good training for that day, so we took them on.  Chuck, Mandy, and I struggled up all of them, and came away feeling that if that is the worst that we run into, we can probably handle it - although it will be a challenge!
 

We also wanted to show you the results of some of the recent flooding on one of the bike trails we use near us here at the park.  This same segment overflowed again just a day or two later with this week's recent rains.
 


This week we also took in the Des Moines Arts Festival - and here are a few shots of that:
 


On a closing note, since you all know that we can always find an excuse to eat, here we are enjoying root beer floats and sundaes at Adventureland this week -- they had and employee-only float day to recognize our efforts, and, as you can see, we didn't miss a chance to be recognized (Mandy was there also -- she was taking the picture) . . . .


RAGBRAI is now only three weeks away, so we'll be trying to spend some serious time getting some miles and hills under our belt so we won't be totally blown away.  Our good friends Jim and Yvette will be coming though here next week for a couple of days, and we're looking forward to seeing them -- after all you can't be in training all the time!

The Bridges of Madison County

Last Thursday, on our day off, the four of us took advantage of relatively decent weather, and toured the six remaining covered bridges of Madison County, which is just to the east of us here in Polk County.  As many of you may remember, a book by the same name, by Robert James Waller, was a worldwide bestseller in 1993, and was made into a 1995 movie starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.  The movie was filmed here, with numerous scenes using the several covered bridges around the county.  The county also has a Covered Bridge Festival every October to further celebrate these historic bridges.
The original sixteen bridges were build in the 1870's and 80's and were covered to protect the large valuable bridge timbers from the weather - not for any artistic or esthetic reason.  As trucks and farm equipment became larger, they were unable to be effectively used, and several have been moved from their original locations.  Only six still remain intact, and they are now a significant tourist draw for the county, as people from all over the world come to see them.  In fact, the main plot line of the book and movie revolves around National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid (Eastwood) who travels to Madison County to do a photographic essay about the bridges, and has a four day affair with Francesca Johnson (Streep) while her husband and children are away at the Illinois State Fair.
In addition, Madison County has another claim to fame -- Winterset, the county seat, is the birthplace of John Wayne, and the house he grew up in contains significant John Wayne memorabilia and is open for tours.
With the help of Mark, our tour guide, and our Street Pilot GPS, we only made one wrong turn in finding and visiting all six of the bridges.  We'd noticed some pretty nasty weather to the north of us while we were in Winterset, and by the time we reached the Imes bridge on the eastern edge of the county, the rain started.  But when we got back to Altoona, the rainstorm was over, and we had an enjoyable barbecue -- the first time that we've been able to use the outdoor grill since we've been here.



As you can imagine, thousands of people come to see the bridges, and many come with their pen or their knife to leave some graffiti.  In all the bridges, the main timbers on the interior have been covered with both current and ancient graffiti, but the historical society has added white painted areas at each end of the bridge (you can see them in the pictures above) --  for people to leave their messages, as opposed to defacing the original bridge timbers.  I'd guess that these are painted over occasionally, and the whole cycle begins again.  Its an interesting approach -- here are a few samples of the notes that we saw --



The girls also took the guys out for Father's Day to Cheddar's for a big before-work lunch -- here are the three hungry dads . . . .


We also got good news from our son Kevin, and his wife Stephanie, that our new grandbaby -- due in November -- will be a girl!!  Congratulations Kevin and Stephanie!

We're just watching it on TV

The current flooding which is impacting much of Iowa is fortunately not occurring where we are.  The downtown area of Des Moines where the levee broke earlier Saturday morning is more than 10 miles from us.  The worst destruction, in Cedar Rapids is in the eastern part of the state, about 100 miles from us.  This is not to say that there is not some impact here, but the campground is pretty full this weekend (some are flood refugees) and we are looking forward to a busy weekend at the amusement park.
More significantly this issue is what all this destruction will do to Iowa in general.  Estimates are that 20% of the corn and soybean crop has been destroyed, and the repair to the damage in the major population areas could take a long time to sort out.  We're hoping that this does not impact RAGBRAI, and that it doesn't upset our employment situation here at Adventureland, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Our images for this post show some fun that we all had last Thursday on our day off -- we played tourist at Adventureland and rode some of the rides that we've been working on for the past several weeks.  It was great fun seeing the park from the perspective of our customers, as well as enjoying the rides.  As you can see from the pictures -- which Mandy doesn't appear in -- Mark and Sue, and I were the brave ones on the scary rides, and Mandy was the designated photographer.  What we didn't get pictures of were the water rides that we all went on -- and got totally drenched.


 

On Friday, the weather finally turned very nice - even in the middle of the cresting of all of Iowa's rivers - and we took advantage of the nice day to get in a good bike ride on the Chichaqua Valley Trail just about 6 miles Northeast of Altoona.  Mandy and I, along with Chuck (who is also riding RAGBRAI this year) rode a full 40 miles in honor of our oldest son's 40th birthday the same day.  Chuck is also a workamper here at Adventureland, and is graciously showing us the good biking trails and routes around here. 
The northeast route that the trail takes crosses the Skunk River, and the bridge across it was barricaded off for safety reasons, but we didn't let that stand in the way of a good ride.  Along the route we saw numerous corn fields flooded and destroyed.  It was a really surreal experience, riding along a beautiful trail on a sunny day, with raging rivers and creeks all around, and the agricultural damage surrounding us.  The trail is a converted railbed, and still has some of the original concrete mile markers showing the rail distance to Kansas City.



Just for fun, we thought we'd include a couple of pictures that Mark happened to snap the other day while we were out looking for an RV parts dealer -- we were just driving down the street when this herd of tires came out in front of us -- apparently they had gotten away from someone unloading them out of a semi trailer that was parked at a bad angle.  Its a good thing we weren't a couple of hundred feet further down the road and in their path -- they were pretty sizeable puppies and were rolling pretty fast!

Waterlogged update

We thought we'd do just a quick post to update things over the past several days.  The wet weather has continued across the upper midwest -- as anyone who watches the news is aware of -- and Iowa has been hit particularly hard.
The rain has continued through early this morning, and has caused some pretty severe flooding on the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers in this area.  Downtown Des Moines has some isolated flooding, primarily due to the necessary opening of the spillway on the dam at Saylorville Lake north of the city, which just compounded the overall heavy flow on the river.  The Corps of Engineers had to open the spillway to avoid possible failure of the dam backing up the lake -- which is at its highest levels since the infamous 1993 floods in this area.
Also making the news is the tornado spawned by yesterday's storms which killed 4 Boy Scouts and injured many more at Little Sioux, just north of Omaha/Council Bluffs, on the Iowa/Nebraska border.  Fortunately no tornados were part of last night's weather through here, just rain, rain, rain.
The good news is that the forecast for the next several days shows some promise, with the rain probability tapering off through Sunday.  Today is our day off, but we're sticking pretty close to here as almost everywhere else is totally waterlogged.  Here at the park, things are relatively dry - at least in comparison to the rest of the area - so we'll just stay around here and get some things done - we may even go over to the park to play tourist and ride a few of our rides.  Our plan is to be able to be back on the bikes by this weekend, and finally start to get some mileage in -- RAGBRAI is only 37 days away, and we need to get back in better shape.  We've finally received all of our ride information and credentials, including a coveted support vehicle pass, which enables us to take the motorhome to stay in each night.
We'll post again soon with some pictures and some better news -- but for now all is OK here, particularly compared to the rest of the state.

Biking, Adventureland, and BOHICA

The past week has brought a real mixed bag of things -- there was some decent weather (but the heat from that just caused more thunderstorms), we were able to spend some time at Adventureland as tourists on Thursday, we evacuated to the local casino Thursday night in the face of more severe thunderstorms, and now this weekend with record setting rain.  BOHICA . . . . .
To clarify -- that's the acronym for Bend Over, Here It Comes Again -- and it unfortunately is a one-word description for the Iowa weather which has impacted our stay here so far. 
Just over the past several days, we had the "perfect storm" weather across the upper Midwest Thursday night, which had us evacuating to the local casino for protection for several hours (fortunately it didn't develop into as fierce a storm as projected, but it still was unnerving).  That night and Friday, Des Moines blew their one-day rainfall record for that date clear out of the water (pun intended!) with rainfall of 4.13 inches.  Saturday was a one day respite, but early Sunday morning the skies opened up again, and I'm sure that records will be set for today.
A few pictures of our fun - although our picture taking has been limited since we don't want to drown our cameras!

Thursday night's evacuation using the casino as a storm shelter  -  since an RV park is a perfect tornado magnet.  We kept track of the storm progress with Bruce's Iphone (look at all the red weather).


Today's (Sunday) view our our front window to our own lake -- and its still coming down.


But we've beat the weather to death, so now some views of some of the fun that we've been able to insert between the rain, thunder and tornados --
Biking . . . . . and carbo-loading --

 

Exploring Adventureland as tourists -- some pictures of the rides and the campground earlier this week to give our readers a better idea of where we're working.  Roll your cursor over each picture for a short description, and click to enlarge . . . . .




We're heading to work today for a 6 hour shift (3 to 9 PM) just about when the next string of thunder showers are projected to start.  Greg's ride (the Outlaw roller-coaster) is under cover, but Mandy's work at the Raging River water ride has her out in the open.   The temperatures are supposed to be in the 70s, so it won't be too uncomfortable, but we've got a lot of Iowans here drowning themselves so we've got to do our Carnie bit.