June 22, 2012

Jim doesn’t have a fever this morning and his headache is much better.  We drove to the Amana Colonies through the countryside. There were really pretty farms and lots of cornfields. The Amana Colonies are a group of villages that were started by the Amanians, radical German Pietists.  They had communal living, no private ownership.  We went to a few of the historical buildings still in use since the 1850’s.  Similar to the Amish they were almost entirely self-sufficient.

 I had a beer at Millstream Brewing and Jim watched me drink it.  He can’t have one till he takes all of his antibiotics. We went to the woolen mill, the furniture store and the meat shop and smokehouse.  All of these were still in operation.  We bought some cheese and sausage for lunch with crackers and honey mustard I had in the Silverado.  We also stopped at a cemetery to see the way they bury their people.  They are buried by the date they die, in order.  The oldest headstone was 9-14-1864 and the newest was 1-27-2012.  All headstones are alike -- plain and simple. We also got to sit in Iowa’s largest rocker.

 We drove back toward camp and found two geocaches in North Liberty.  Then we went to Lake McBride and saw a raptor exhibit and went to a bird blind.  There were owls, vultures, hawks, a golden eagle, and a bald eagle.  We found a geocache here also.  We found one more by a very long baseline array radio telescope (VLBA antenna).  There are ten of these spread around the US, one in St. Croix, New Hampshire, Iowa, Texas, New Mexico (2), Arizona, California, Washington and Hawaii.  They allow astronomers to make detailed studies of celestial objects.  Computers combine the data from all of these antennas to simulate a single antenna 5,000 miles wide.  The resulting images are very detailed – the array could resolve a football on the surface of the moon (if one was there).  The antenna weighs 260 tons and is 82 feet in diameter.  This geocache had a travel bug in it so we took it.  We will drop it off in another geocache. We went back to camp and had dinner.  The camp in totally full, noisy and smoky -- we hate weekends when we travel.  Jim is still ok tonight.  Maybe he will be ok from now on.