On to Wisconsin

After spending several days in the Root River Valley we headed to La Crosse, WI to meet up with Dennie and Dee from Colorado Springs. We arrived there on friday and set up camp then went in to do our laundry and see the town.
La Crosse is a city of about 52,000 but it felt larger than that as it is spread out north and south along the Mississippi river but only about 4 to 5 miles wide due to the river valley.

It is a very pretty city with many older buildings downtown and the downtown area seemed to be a busy and active place with a lot of various types of business's.
We went to the Riverwalk area as they were having sand sculpture contests and here are a few of the sculptures, they turned out real nice. Each team was working hard trying to finish their project before the 4pm deadline for judging. Not bad for a bunch of amateurs!!

They also have a couple of riverboats here that cruise the Mississippi, one just does cruises for a couple of hours but the other one has dinner cruises with entertainment. Since we were there during the day we opted to take the river cruise and it was very interesting. I will list more about it in the next post.

After we left Spirit Lake area of Iowa we headed north into Minnesota. It was a short drive as Minnesota was up the road from our campsite about 3 miles at the most. We drove west on the interstate in southern MN to a small town of 269 people called Peterson. They have a small city campground that is very nice and we were the only ones in the campground for about 3 days. They have full hookups at the campground and there is 10 sites total. We had intended on driving across the northen part of Iowa on the back roads but we had so many bad roads across the eastern part we decided to stick to the interstate across southern MN. We lost the bike seat and stem off of Barbs bike heading into Spirit Lake due to the rough roads and had a tough time finding a replacement so we decided to play it safe.
The bike trail that runs along the Root River in southern MN was right behind our camper in Peterson so it was easy to get on and off the bike trail.
On the first day we road our bikes to the city of Rushford going west from Peterson. It is a nice town and we ran around town on the bikes and we started noticing a lot of construction around the town on the houses. Then we noticed that a lot of the houses also had paint markings on them near the front doors with dates and times marked on the siding. We road back over to the museum and found out that the previous august they had a flood in town that had flooded every single business in town along with all the houses in one certain area. The creek that ran on the NE side of town had ran over the dikes that had been put there back in the 1960's and flooded the low end of the city. The city had really done a good job of cleaning up tho, as you could not see water marks on hardly anything in the downtown area.
Everyone was working hard on rebuilding everything they could and it looked like they were doing a great job of it. We headed back to Peterson and road our bikes around the small town to look at the sites and finished our day with about 14 or 15 miles of total riding. The countryside in this area was very nice, mostly wooded with lots of hardwoods.

The small towns in this area are very interesting to visit, with small museums that give you a history of the area and towns. Peterson MN looks like a retirement community as there is not much there for jobs, no gas station, grocery store or even a convenience store. You need to go to one of the other towns nearby for all the necessary items.

We really enjoyed our quiet little campground that we had all to ourselves for 3 nites.

Spirit Lake Iowa

We left Niobrara State Park and headed into Iowa. We went thru LeMars, Iowa on the way to Spirit Lake area. Of course that is the home of Wells Dairy, maker of Blue Bunny Ice Cream, Soooooooo!! guess what we did? We stopped and had some Ice Cream of course!! We both ordered a shake and headed back on the road. It was very good but boy did we have ice cream overload as the shakes were large ones.

We arrived in the Spirit Lake area and discovered that this was a large resort area with lots of lakes. The first campground we went to was full, so we found another one on another area of the same lake. We found out that there was a Bible conference in the area and a lot of the campgrounds, motels, etc were full.

We stayed at the small state park on the east side of the lake called Elinor Bedell. It had very large pull thru's, over 100 ft long. The only problem was the power, water and sewer were all in the wrong place. There was no bathrooms, in fact there was nothing else at this park except parking. You could not connect to the sewer unless you had at least 30 ft of hose with you. the same with the water connection, it took 2 hoses to reach it. We dont know who designs some of these modern campgrounds but they dont consult with RV owners when they build them. It was a nice park other than that. We did move the following night to Marble Beach campground and found out that they were right in the middle of the Mayfly hatch and there were millions of them. The good thing about them was they dont bite, they just fly around all over the place.

We had a couple of great bike rides, went to a old car show, watched boats move from one lake to the next under the road and generally had a great time. While we were at McDonalds having a cool soda we noticed a funnel cloud south of town, I took some photos of it, then we found out later that it was called a cool cloud funnel, which meant it wasnt really a tornado style of funnel cloud.

We bought some local corn on the cob and wow was it great, I think we had it 3 days in a row. We cooked in on the BBQ, roasting ears, and they tasted sweet. They call it Candy Corn out here because it is so sweet.

We had a great time in Iowa but we couldnt wait to get into Minnesota to try out one of the bike trails up there. One thing about some of the Iowa roads, they are really bumpy, especially when you are towing a trailer. We lost the bike seat and stem from Barbs bike so we had to find a bike store and find the correct size. Good thing we had internet connection, it really helps in finding stuff like that.

On to Minnesota!!

Niobrara State Park

We stayed at Niobrara State Park for several days the first week of Aug. It is a real nice state park with lots of deer and wild turkeys roaming the park area. It sits along the Missouri River and is home to a lot of Sandhill Cranes. We road our bikes along the bike trail that runs alongside the river. It was an old railroad bed that has been converted to a trail.

It was a very nice ride with great views of the river and bluffs on the South Dakota side of the river. We rode for about 14 miles total and then went into the town of Niobrara to see what we could find there. It looks like a nice small town and we rode thru the neighborhoods then back out to the campground.

Here is a photo of one of the cranes out in the river and one shot of us along the river. the cranes are real hard to get close too as they are very nervous so I had to use a telephoto shot from our pickup truck to get this shot.

Nebraska National Forest

We left Scottsbluff area and headed out to the Nebraska National Forest, the only hand planted National Forest in the US. The trees were planted back in the 1930's and 40's. A tree nursery was established in this area to grow the trees for this area and also other national forests.

The campground was a little uneven in most sites as it looked like they had had some rains at sometime and it had washed out some areas of the campsites making them uneven. we found a newer site further down in the campground and had plenty of room. It was hot so we decided to go check out the swimming pool!! This is the only National forest campground in the US with its own swimming pool. It was built

back in the 1940's probably to accomodate the CCC workers that were "building" the Nebraska National Forest. The pool looked nice but was crowded so we opted to go for a "swim" in the Middle Loup River which runs thru this area.

The River is about 100 yards wide and 6 inches deep in most places, so we kinda

did a float. Shasta enjoyed walking thru the water and we gave her a quick bath by splashing water on her. It cooled her off and we also got cooled down as it had been close to 100 and humid when we got to the campground.

We stayed a few days then headed to Niobrara State Park in the NE part of Nebraska.