Forest City to Cedar Falls to Iowa City

 

The trip so far, 24 days on the road.

June 9 2023 Friday.

We had a busy day today; we got up early and took the 9 am tour at the Winnebago Motorhome factory here in Forest City Iowa. It is a huge complex with many large buildings and 4000 employees. Winnebago still builds their product the old fashion way, they do almost all of it in-house by their employees. There is very little done by subcontractors.

During the tour I didn’t flaunt my experience in vehicle manufacturing even though I could see a lot of room for improvement in their build process. This is for my adopted southern family; that would be like a New Jersey transplant in the south saying, “up north we did it better!” Then again, I was but a minor cog in the system during my 38 years in the auto assembly business so what do I know. 

Anyhow, they’ve been doing it this way for a long time and seem to be happy producing 8 motorhomes a day. We made as many a 1280 cars per day in our auto assembly plant back in the day.  In their defense, every one of their vehicles is a custom build, no two are exactly alike. 

No pictures were allowed during the tour. I snagged these off the net.

We returned to the RV at 11am, ate lunch, packed up and left with two days left in our reservation. We had seen everything we came to see and decided to get a head start in our next direction.

Black Hawk County Park near Cedar Falls Iowa is a no reservation, first come first served campground. We were lucky and secured a beautiful site by the pond. We had no neighbors within 100 feet and a huge shade tree. It was electric only for $18 a night, and has water spigots located around the park for filling your onboard water tank. There is a  holding tanks dump station when you leave. We have found most city, county and state campgrounds in Iowa are equipped like this. We will be here for two nights.

While we were in Cedar Falls, we went out for a driving tour of the area. Along the way we stopped at a community famers market at a park in the city, several garage sales, a Wal Mart and an Aldi’s. I don’t know what that says about us, but we both enjoyed the day.

June 11 2023 Sunday

We pressed on today; we have a reservation in Sugar Bottom Campground. It is a Corp of Engineers Campground on Coralville Lake located just north of Iowa City. We are here for an eye injection I need every six weeks; I have an appointment with an eye doctor tomorrow morning.

On the way south for this 90 mile leg of the adventure we passed through the city of Cedar Rapids. Never have we seen so many grain processing plants, nor have we seen any this huge. This is definitely a major grain processing center, which makes sense considering the vast majority of Iowa is farms. Millie told me Cedar Falls is the largest processor of corn in the US. We saw several cereal manufacturing plants as we passed though town.

Our camp site at Sugar Bottom CG is almost first class. It is a concrete pad on a slight mound overlooking the lake. I say almost because of the lack of full hookup utilities on the site.

That’s it for now; it has been overcast and chilly all day. It’s afternoon and the sun is out but the air is still chilly. On Wednesday we head west and do a six day, no plans, no reservations, driving tour of Western Iowa and Nebraska.