Escape the Heat!

By Jen.

Dates: 2021/06/29 to 2021/07/02

NOTE: For 2021, we are going to swap it up a bit, alternating between earlier in the year and current, since we so far behind with posts. We will post the dates on each post so you know whether it was recent or not.

After a few weeks of additional maintenance and modifications, we left Arkansas to try and escape the heat, which was becoming unbearable. With the West experiencing record-high temperatures and a heat dome, and the Northeast also experiencing high temps, we thought our best course of action would be to head directly north. Our original plan had been to head into Canada, but the border opening was delayed a month. So our new plan is to head north to the border, then move east along the Great Lakes. Hopefully at some point, the border will open and we can cross over.

 

What have they done to oatmeal? 😱

 

Having grown up in southwest Kansas, I have a romanticized notion of the prairie. Give me flat lands and waving grasses any day. So, while I was looking up places to visit on our way north, visiting a prairie was high on my list. This one in Missouri blew my mind! Who knew there were so many flowers in a prairie? (Also lots of ticks!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You could hear birds all around you on the ground, but most of the time you couldn’t see them through the grasses.

 

We stopped to see and stay in Rochester Falls, but it had rained too much to see the cascades. And, enough that leaving the gravel in a heavy vehicle resulted in getting stuck. This crew did all the wrong things and went from being just slightly stuck to stuck up to the chassis!

 

 

In Iowa, we stopped at Council Bluffs to see the Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge.

 

 

 

 

 

Here we learned that the mighty Missouri River would flood the entire valley and carve a new course every year! Of course, to European settlers, who liked to “settle” that wouldn’t work, so we managed to tame the river to mostly a single course using channels, chutes, and backwaters. This process removed 205 miles from the USA’s longest river.

 

We stayed at Jones Creek Pond that night and were joined by a pretty goldfinch!

 

 

 

As we were driving along the Loess Hills Scenic Byway, we saw a sign for Preservation Canyon. Wanting to know what earned the name of “canyon” in western Iowa, we made a stop.

 

Basically just some hills and a deeper valley between them.

 

And for our last stop in Iowa, we discovered a Catholic Church’s shrine for the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, IA. It is the largest man-made grotto, and it is a sight to behold!

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was so overwhelming to see! There was so much detail, it was difficult to look at, but it was impressive! Someone must have scavenged materials from all over the world to make this. They had geodes, rock rosettes, tiles, seashells, quartz. Basically, any type of rock you could find here.

 

There were even new formations naturally growing from being in this place for so long and water dripping through!

Finally, that night, the humidity went down, and the temps went down, and we didn’t need to sleep with the A/C on! It was wonderful!