States

We’re in Iowa now. This is our 42th state. It’s going to be difficult to get the last states since they are in all the edges of the country like Delaware, Alaska, and Hawaii. We’re also at 127 National places. The Ice Age National Scenic Trail was fun. We saw that we’d pass a small part of it. So we parked and hiked about 10 minutes on the trail to mark it off our list. Given that the trial is 1,200 miles, we aren’t planning on walking the entire thing!

Weekend camping tends to be more difficult. As a full-timer, we don’t care that it is a weekend or a holiday; we just want a good place to camp. This time we were in an area with a weekend Blues Festival. We ended up getting the last campsite at Pikes Peak State Park on a Thursday.

I took a morning walk on Deer Ridge Trail. Suddenly, I heard a crash beside me and realized I startled a deer that was probably sleeping beside the trail. Scared both of us! The view was gorgeous along the top of a cliff. It overlooks the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

Bridal Veil Falls was an interesting hike because it was lightly raining and lots of stairs.

The park has 63 Native American mounds, but we couldn’t find all of them. There were several conical ones along Deer Ridge Trail. This one is bear shaped.