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.