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!