Travel Adventures

While the 65th Anniversary celebration was great, Getting there was also a lot of fun. Bobby and I resolved to not make the usual interestate highway death march to get there on time. Instead we decided to go the slow way, via Galena and Union, Illinois. Galena was a home of U.S. Grant, and we are both Civil War buffs; Union has a fine railroad museum. We also decided to stop at anything interesting along the way.

During the great 1993 flood, water surged over the emergency spillway at the Coralville Dam near Iowa City. It stripped away mayrds of overburden to reveal a layer of Devonian bedrock, littered with undersea fossils. It is now a public park, and it was our first stop.

Bobby strides across the Devonian seabed.

Noting a fossil.

Bobby on the observation deck, with the fossil bed in the background.

The spillway that caused it all.

Little did we know that within minutes we would be embroiled in a Civil War...