The trip to Davenport, Iowa, was an easy 141 miles. We are staying in the RV section of the West Lake Park, huge, beautiful park run by the Scott County Conservation Board.
I made contact again with the people from whom I'm trying to get the electrical part. They had never returned my calls, of course. They agreed to a simple way to solve my problem, and they convinced me it would easy for me to install it. We should receive the new part in a few days. We'll see how that works out.
Davenport is one of the five cities comprising "The Quad [sic] Cities" of Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, and Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline, Illinois. They straddle the Mississippi River. Naturally, it's a very industrial area.
Shortly after we arrived in Davenport, we had a small ceremony attaching the state of Iowa to our RV map. It is the final state of the contiguous 48 states that we have visited in our RV. (We have also now visited 6 of the 10 Canadian provinces in our RV.)
On Thursday, we met with Dan Portes, a retained head hunter whose office is in Davenport. Becky had hired Dan in 1999 to find someone to fill a key spot in her Wealth Management Division when she was an EVP at Sanwa Bank. They had fun catching up.
We then went to nearby Le Claire, Iowa, to have lunch at a restaurant with a reputation for serving a special wine-based lunch every Thursday. It turned out that they stopped that program after Labor Day and are now closed on Thursday. Thus dejected, we walked to the Sneaky Pete's Saloon a block away and had a nice lunch, anyway. I had a hamburger steak. The building Pete's occupies is the oldest commercial building in Le Claire, and was originally a hotel.
Le Claire is "picturesque," which means it has a bunch of old buildings, and not much else, but it is the ancestral home of Buffalo Bill Cody, and houses the Buffalo Bill Museum, located between Sneaky Pete's and the Mississippi River.
After lunch, we ventured a little farther up the Mississippi to Clinton, Iowa, where my mother's relatives had a farm many years ago. We stopped at WalMart there to pick up some supplies.
It was at least drizzling most of Thursday, so after visiting Clinton, we headed back to Davenport and hid under the bed (figuratively). Tomorrow, it's on to Grimes, Iowa.
Grimes, just outside of Des Moines, the state capital, is 170 miles from Davenport---all of it on I-80. We are staying at Cutty's Des Moines Camping Club, a huge (500 RV sites) place with lots of grass and trees. It's very pretty. We are in a nice end-of-the-row site with a large side yard.
This is also the second RV park in a row that doesn't take reservations. In the case of the park in Davenport, I was told it's because they would be completely booked up all year the minute they opened reservations, and they want to give people a real chance to stay there. In the case of the park here in Grimes, I believe it's because they have so many sites no one is ever turned away and there is no point in gumming up the works with reservations.
Since today (Friday) is a travel day, we pretty much relaxed once we got here.
Saturday, we hit the trifecta---Costco, WalMart, and Trader Joe's.
It was 142 miles from Grimes to Little Sioux, Iowa, and the weirdest RV park we’ve ever stayed in. The Woodland Campground has 1,000 sites, 986 of which are owned and used by members who live here permanently---in RVs of various ages, but mostly old and with varying degrees of decrepitude (as are also the members).
Sunday afternoon, we headed to Omaha (30+ miles away) just to take a look, neither of us having been there before. We scoped out the downtown area, which, being Sunday, was largely empty. It’s a nice-looking area, with a lot of apparent redevelopment. That is, there are few old buildings. There is an interesting park development---covering three separate sites, which are thematically related to the pioneer spirit that developed the area. There are beautiful sculptures of the pioneers, their wagons,
Omaha is on the Missouri River, across the river from Council Bluffs, Iowa. But driving from one part of Omaha to another, we passed a sign that said, “Welcome to Iowa.” It turns out that there was a flood more than a century ago that changed the course of the Missouri River such that the tiny city of Carter Lake, Iowa, was suddenly isolated on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. Both states then claimed “ownership” of Carter Lake. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that it still belonged to Iowa, making it the only part of Iowa that lies west of the Missouri River. How's that for an interesting factoid?
Being on the Missouri River, we are again in Lewis & Clark country. We stopped at the local regional office of the National Park Service and once again were faced with a pile of L & C history and memorabilia. Fascinating. They really did courageous and amazing things in their exploration.
We also went to Rick’s Boatyard Café for a quick drink overlooking the Missori River. It was very serene. Then returned to our RV park to while away the rest of the day.
On Monday, we went to Tekemah, Nebraska, to have dinner with Rich and Carol Smiley, who live there. Rich worked with Becky at Union Bank about 15 years ago. Tekemah is about five miles from Little Sioux if you're a bird, but about 25 miles away otherwise. We had to drive north, then cross an old bridge with a measly $1.00 toll, then head back south. But it was worth it. The Smileys are fun people, and we enjoyed seeing them and their little town.
That trip to Nebraska ended our six days in Iowa.
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