The past week has been good, once we got through the heavy storms of last weekend. The weather is slowly getting better (warmer and drier) and the work at Adventureland is going along well. We also had our normal day off, and, since it still was a bit rainy that day, we took the opportunity to visit the state capitol building near downtown Des Moines.
Its a wonderful building, and Iowans are justly proud of it. It is the only 5 domed capitol building in the country. The main dome is covered by a paper-thin sheet of pure 23 carat gold (it was recently "regilded" at a cost of over a half a million dollars) and it brightens the landscape from miles away.
Our tour took us through the Governor's office, the Iowa Senate and House of Representatives chambers, and the original courtroom for the Iowa Supreme Court. The court has moved to a different building, but the original Law Library is still in the capitol -- and it was an amazing room, with four tiers of bookshelves, connected with lots of circular stairways with ornate railings.
Part of our tour also took us up into the main dome itself, where we could get closer views of the ornate artwork inside the dome itself.
We had an outstanding tour guide, who gave us a 2 hour tour of the significant areas of the building -- and, of course we all took pictures. Here are some of ours that we thought were the best -- click on any of them to enlarge.
As we're writing this, the rain is unfortunately starting again, after a nice weekend, and the forecast is more of the same for the next couple of days -- although there does not appear to be any of the tornado-spawning variety on the horizon. The good news is that we start on a new set of rides today -- Mandy will be working the Raging River, and Greg will be on the Outlaw -- one of the two wooden roller-coasters here.
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