Blue Roads, Red Roads or Orange Roads?Jun 28, 2010
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The corn is doing great. The farmers got the planting done early...
The color contrasts of green are beautiful
One of those orange (county) roads in Iowa.
| When I look at our road atlas to plan our trip, there are sometimes choices that have to be made about the route we will take. Blue lines are for the interstate highways, red ones for state highways and then there are yellow and orange ones for county roads. We are getting braver and braver about taking the county roads. In fact, sometimes they are smoother than the other roads with less construction. And we are in no particular hurry; we're retired! Today we drove from Savanna, Illinois to Iowa City, Iowa. We planned to camp at an Army Corps of Engineers campground. We did not have reservations. We usually don't have reservations but for the big holiday weekends like Memorial Day, the 4th of July and Labor Day, it's wise to make them. I had tried to make reservations for the 4th of July weekend at least one month ago but there was nothing available. The Corps of Engineers campgrounds set aside some campsites that are not reservable but go as "first come first serve" sites. We took our chances that we could find a site if we arrived well before the big weekend. I was a bit worried since the reservable sites were already taken weeks ago. I knew this was going to be a popular place for the big holiday weekend. We got here about noon and sure enough, all the places in the first section that were walk ins as they call them, we're already taken. I think people set up their campers and then leave to go to work for a few more days. They don't mind paying the fees because they are very reasonable. I often feel we have more than our share of grace-filled experiences because as I prepared to drive around in the car looking in other sections for a camp site, a couple walking by told me that they had just left a site because they had to move after 14 days. They would take me to it, which they did. Yeah! We are now ensconced in a nice spot and I'm waiting for the office to open at 4:00 p.m. to make our payment. It is a non-reservable site so it is now ours. As a gift from Uncle Sam for reaching the age of 62, we have Golden Age Passports which means we pay 50% of the daily fee. It's amazing. We get into all National Parks for free and we get 50% off of campgrounds at federal government owned campgrounds. I think we will be paying $8 per night. My goal is to try to pay less than $30 so as you can imagine, this price is a bargain. As I mentioned earlier we have been using some yellow and orange roads. We did that today and enjoyed it very much. I took some photos while we were traveling. They are taken through the windshield (obviously) but they still turned out pretty good. For all of you who are city slickers or live where there are not these kinds of beautiful farms, I hope you will get an idea of how beautiful the Midwest landscape is to behold. |
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