Fun in the Quad Cities

Prayer to mother nature: Take your snow and shovel it back north. Yes, we left Regina on Monday only to encounter a small blizzard in the city. I won’t bore you with the details but suffice it to say that for 6 hours through to the far side of Minot it was snowing! Hello! Did someone forget the memo that we’re going on our BCT (Big Camping Trip) and weren’t supposed to see snow this year?

Anyway, made it through North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa and while the temperatures aren’t ‘normal’ we can certainly handle +14C. When we finally drove out of the snow and ice we joked that we never thought we’d be so happy to see +7 C and raining…. At this point we were so excited about the weather that if you didn’t know where we were and just heard us talking you’d have thought we were in the tropics.

As for sightseeing, so far it has been fairly limited as we’re still trying to get east and south before the snow catches up to us again.

We did, however, tour the Winnebago Industries plant in Forest City, Iowa which was nice. They certainly have quite a system for putting together their motorhomes. Tomas and Victoria were given Winnebago Motorhome trading cards – you can’t imagine the excitement. They also had to wear safety goggles. One size does not fit all. You could’ve put 2 of Toria’s heads’ into the goggles. As for Tomas, he looked like he was playing ‘peek-a-boo’ – he had to use both hands to hold them up and then he couldn’t see where he was going! Memo to self: buy children’s safety goggles if planning on future factory tours.

The kids have been great – we’ve put in some long days of driving but they’ve been fantastic. We’re on day 5 of our trip and have played 100 games of eye-spy. With 177 days to go that means… well you can do the math.

When we left Forest City you pass consecutive towns called ‘Fertile’ and ‘Manly’ – there has got to be a good story there. Of course, in the nearby town of Elmore (pop. 735) the fire station shares the same building as the liquor store.

I had better sign off but if you’ve ever wondered how tall the corn is in Iowa – I can tell you that you could use the dually truck in a field.

Oh yes, future travels: Currently we think that we’ll spend 3 days in Moline, Illinois/Davenport, Iowa (side-by-side towns) to visit the John Deere Factory and relax a little before heading to St. Louis on Sunday.

Cheers -- Carmen