Wednesday, May 18, 2022; Effigy Mounds, Wisconsin Cheese Curds and Charles City Iowa
We were planning on touring the Winnebago factory in Forest City but when we called, we found out that today’s tours were fully booked. So we booked for Thursday, and made plans to head to eastern Iowa to check out the Effigy Mounds National Monument.
As we headed diagonally southeast from Rochester MN into Iowa, we stopped at a tourist information center in Harmony to use their bathrooms and ask about the Amish community since we had seen a couple horse drawn buggies driving into town.
We drove through some of the Amish farm country. It was easy enough to identify the Amish farms because they had no electrical power service leading onto the properties. We drove by one farm where a man was fitting harnesses onto six horses, getting them ready for plowing. The highway in the area had extra wide shoulders to accommodate the horse drawn vehicle traffic outside of the main motor vehicle traffic lanes and was labeled “Amish Byway”.
After crossing from Minnesota into Iowa, we were lured off the path by signs for a Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Burr Oak Iowa.
There was a complex of a couple of historic buildings in the tiny town of Burr Oak. We visited the gift shop and toured the old bank building while learning about the travels and life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Praire and many other books about her life on the western frontier. She and her family had actually moved several times during her childhood, working their way cross the western frontier dealing with a series of missteps and misfortunes.
We ended up looking for lunch in Deborah, Iowa, and found a very busy and popular spot called The Family Table, who’s motto is “Nothing fancy, just good”.
The service was excellent and the food was well prepared, tasty and of generous portions. We didn’t have room for pie, but they had at least a dozen different pies available. The T-shirts the waitresses wore said “Pie makes it all better”.
We finally arrived at the Effigy Mounds National Monument on the border between Iowa and Wisconsin. It turns out we didn’t need Janet’s National Park Senior pass because admission to this particular monument is free. There is a small visitor center which does a pretty good job of explaining the origins and purpose of these animal shaped burial mounds. Several Indian tribes in the area had a tradition of burying their dead in mounds and in this particular area, some had the tradition of building these mounds in the shape of animals. That is why these are called effigy mounds.
The mounds in this area are on a ridge overlooking the Mississippi River, so the hike from the visitor center up to the ridge where the mounds are involves about 400’ elevation gain which all occur within the first half mile of switchbacks. It’s a good thing the temperature was in the lower 70’s and humidity was low today. While it was interesting to see the mounds, it is hard to appreciate the actual animal shapes without being able to see them from above.
We supposed this could have been a much smaller scale operation akin to the Nasca Lines in Peru. Conversely, it may also be possible the Nasca Lines mark burial chambers in Peru rather than simply being abstract works of art.
Since we were just across the Mississippi River from Wisconsin, and neither of us had ever been in Wisconsin before, we decided to cross the Mississippi and explore the town of Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin.
We stopped at the Visitor information center and ended up driving around St. Feriole Island. Prairie du Chien was a very important port on the Mississippi for fur trading and other commerce. The city was originally on St. Feriole Island, but a series of floods eventually lead the town to migrate up the eastern bank of the river, safely above the flood plain. The Island had a few remaining grand homes and some rail infrastructure, but most of the land was converted to park land. The Villa Louis is in the process of being made into a museum, but was not open to the public, so we walked around the duck pond and snapped a few pictures. We then drove to the southern part of Prairie du Chien, past the airport, to refuel, taking on 14.072gal @ $5.049/gal with 24681 miles on the odometer (13mpg). Most gas stations in Iowa were charging more than $5.30/gal. Then before crossing back into Iowa, we stopped at a Piggly Wiggly market and bought some Wisconsin cheese curds.
We recrossed the Mississippi into Iowa and headed northwest towards Forest City, where the WInnebago factory is. Ben checked the Harvest Host app and found a museum on our path which would put us just an hour’s drive from Forest City. This was the Floyd County Historical Society. Although the museum was closed by the time we arrived, the parking lot was spacious, empty, and across the street from a city park. There happened to be a fresh water hydrant by the sidewalk in the park. It looked like it was padlocked, but in fact, there was a padlock on a chain, but the hydrant was fully useable. So we were able to top off our fresh water tank. There was also an outside GFCI protected outlet next to a heat pump unit on the side of the museum, so we would be able to plug in for power. The temperatures were in the mid to upper 70’s late in the afternoon, but expected to drop into the 50’s overnight.
Ben saw that there was a whitewater park on the river and public library nearby, so we drove the RV across the Cedar River to check it out. There is a dam across the river upstream, and in the stretch of the river in front of the public library, there are two bridges, and between the bridges, they have constructed some white water features for water sports enthusiasts (primarily kayaks) to play in with standing waves and rapids.
There was also a small sandy beach that several teens were swimming at, and a very nice river walk on both sides of the river. There was a “Story” path in front of the library featuring a childrens’ book on Worms. Oak Harbor has a similar pathway in its City Beach park where a children’s story book is usually featured.
The public library had a nice water fountain with a water bottle refilling station, so we topped off our water bottles. It also had wifi so we parked the RV near the library and were able to stream some news while uploading pictures and downloading email. There was also a large sporting goods/farm and home store called Thiesen’s across the street that we walked through to see if they might sell a propane sniffer, but they didn’t carry one in the store. Ben was hoping to find one to pinpoint the leak in the RV’s propane system.
We had dinner at The Pub on the Cedar, which featured local microbrews. We had two very good salads for dinner (popcorn chicken chop salad and grilled chicken dried cranberry and candied walnut raspberry poppyseed salad).
We returned to the museum and settled down for the night. Tomorrow we’ll hopefully see the factory where our RV was assembled.
