ON THE ROAD AGAIN.
Day 8 – Beginning of Week 2 and last week we put 1,174 miles on the RV & travelled from the Hudson Valley in NY through PA, OH, IN, IL, & some of IA; visiting 6 states & staying at 5 different campgrounds. We saw lots of farmlands, went to a winery, visited an RV museum & a Raptor Center, and spent a couple of days with friends. Rolling hills, trees, lakes, flatlands, farms, & corn. We’re looking forward to the changes that this coming week will bring.
232 miles
Happy Birthday, Sophie! We hope you have a wonderful day! Loved the pictures of your new little kittens!
We got up at 6:20 a.m.; it was 51 degrees and humid. We packed up for our next travelling day & said good-bye to Mark & Donna. We talked about camping together again & took pictures by our respective RV’s.
Mark and Donna with their RV at Amana RV Park, Amana, IA
Amana Colonies RV Park, 3890 C St., Amana, IA 52203, (319) 622-7616, http://www.amanarvpark.com/. Site #12, full hook-ups, half price – Passport America discount. There are about 500 RV sites here. All sites are in a large field, like a very large parking lot, but they are not spaced so close together that you’re right on top of your neighbor. There’s plenty of room for the largest of vehicles. The campground is used primarily for rallies & events. It’s centrally located in the middle of the 7 Amana Colonies, a big tourist draw. There are galleries & stores, museums & restaurants, wineries & breweries, & many historic buildings. There are bike trails & the scenery is beautiful. Conveniently located about 15 minutes from I-80. The people we dealt with were very nice & accommodating, moving things around to put Mark & Donna close to our site. We’d come back again for a night or two, but if we were going to stay longer, we’d probably go to one of the campgrounds on a lake that we visited yesterday.
We left Amana and got back on good old I-80W at 9:25 and it was sunny out. It turned out to be a busy day. As we continued west on the 80, there were less fields of corn & more fields of cows, lots of wind turbines, more trees & rolling hills, and some of the fields were red/orange rather than being dominated by the yellows we’d seen previously. We like Iowa; it’s pretty & clean, everything is so nicely landscaped.
We stopped for lunch at a rest stop & took a break with the kitties. They’re funny….they’ve adapted so well that a couple of times recently one or two parked themselves on the bed, waiting, with a look that said, “I’m ready to leave now”, instead of waiting to be hunted down in a hiding place & carried to the bedroom. When we stop for a break, they come charging out & roam from window to window, finding a sunny place, taking turns with the water dish & the food. Then one by one off they go to the bedroom again without argument when they see the trucks at the rest stop, as if they know this is not where they’ll be spending the night.
Leaving the rest stop at 12:35 p.m., it was 67 degrees and started raining hard. The weather is quickly changeable here. As we got to western IA, the rain stopped. We got off the 80, to take I-680W, the route which would ultimately take us around Council Bluffs, IA & Omaha, NE to avoid the heavier traffic. There was a sign for a scenic viewing tower; Rob stopped to take a few pictures.
We soon headed north on IA-29, reaching Wilson Island State Recreation Area/Wilson Island State Park, our campground for the night. This campground is on the border of Nebraska & IA and is right next to the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge. We drove thru the campground and picked our site, #25, electric only, a really great site at the end of a loop surrounded by trees, completely private. We hurriedly unpacked, grabbed the camera, & drove the short distance to the National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). 3 p.m., 74 degrees, humid, some mosquitoes.
This place was wonderful! We love to do the auto tours at NWRs, often taking hours to drive just 10 miles because we drive very slowly, stopping often for pictures & to check out the surroundings. These drives never disappoint us. The roads going thru DeSoto NWR were well maintained and went on for many miles with lots of turn-offs & side roads to other things to see, meanwhile traversing across the Nebraska border, then back again across the Iowa border. There were fields covered with beautiful yellow flowers and lots of Monarch Butterflies were enjoying them. We saw deer and many different birds, mostly birds of prey. We were just a little too early in the year to catch the annual fall migration of snow geese, which tend to number in the 500,000’s. At the Visitor Center, a viewing area has been built out over the River & marshlands. During the fall the geese cover the water and fill the skies. Bald eagles swoop down right at eye level. We will absolutely come back for that spectacle another time!
Desoto NWR, Missouri Valley, IA
The Visitor Center was one of the best we’ve ever been to – we HIGHLY recommend that people stop by! It was large and had the typical animal, bird, fish displays, But in addition, they had a fantastic exhibition of just some of the many artifacts retrieved from the Bertrand, a huge steam/paddlewheel ship which sunk in the Mississipi River (at the site of this Refuge) in 1864. The Bertrand was dug up in the 1960’s, and the extremely well-preserved artifacts were cleaned & catalogued, meticulously exhibited at the Center. We spent quite awhile here.
DeSoto NWR, Missouri Valley, IA
THANK YOU, Mark & Donna, for telling us about this wonderful NWR!
When we returned returned to the RV, it was getting dark. The girls were sleeping on the dashboard & weren’t too interested in dinner, but we were hungry – had spaghetti & garlic bread – and went off to bed early. What a great day!