Destination Amana Colonies and Echo Valley State Park, Iowa - June 30, 2023

This morning Rob scratched his head and felt a bump. Further investigation confirmed that we must have missed a tick in last night's check. After removing the tick from the top of Rob's head, we loaded up and were on the road by 7 am. The sky looked so ominous we felt as if we were traveling in the middle of the night.

We love to take the road less traveled. Headed toward the Amana Colonies, we went through Oskaloosa, IA - a pretty town with some old Victorian homes and a big old courthouse. Also home to William Penn University. We didn't get any pictures though. There was too much rain. We made our way to the Amana Colonies and drove around looking at some of the homes. Lots of homes had first-floor walls that were entirely covered with trellises and we later found out these were for grapevines that many families grew.



Our plan was to visit the Amana Heritage Museum. The price of admission included three separate buildings spread throughout the colonies. It was still raining, and we didn't really want to walk in the rain so we decided to move on. We did talk to the docent at that museum and he gave us a brief explanation of their beginnings. You can find out more about them here - History of the Seven Villages. On the way out of town, we passed the Whirlpool plant where they make Amana refrigeration products. Amana had been an independent company and was later purchased by Whirlpool.

Whirlpool/Amana Plant

We had lunch at Ma and Pa's Diner in Oelwein, Iowa and ate fried walleye. It will not make the list of our favorite fish.

We were impressed by the beautiful rolling cornfields and how different this part of Iowa was from Kansas, but we couldn't quite imagine what the campground would be like. When we were only five miles away from our destination, according to GPS, Rob kept assuming that every group of trees in the middle of a cornfield was going to be our campground. But when we were only one mile away, the road turned sharply downward and at the end of the pavement, we arrived at a sign saying Echo Valley State Park. We turned in and we were amazed at what we discovered.



Camp is all set

View from the screen tent

Can you see our campsite? This view is from the footbridge across the creek.

Echo Valley State Park is near West Union, Iowa. The name says State Park but it is managed by the Fayette County Conservation Board. $10 per night for no electricity or water. There are some pit toilets but they aren't really close to where we set up camp. As far as we can tell, we have the whole place to ourselves! We expected to see other campers as all the campgrounds around us were full. Our campsite is right beside a creek and the sound of the water kept lulling us to sleep before dinner. However, around 7:30 pm, we began to hear the sound of thousands of two hundred pound hornets. Apparently there is a motor speedway close by. How well we sleep tonight remains to be seen!

Just as we were considering going to bed, a family off raccoons walked through our campsite as if to remind us to pack everything away before going to bed.





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