The low was 75 degrees with high humidity, so we ran the AC all nights. Jeeze, we thought we were getting away from this Charleston-like weather!
Cloudy, warm and humid at 6am with the forecast for very hot and humid. We had been thinking of golf, but decided to wait to get better weather. We spent the morning doing some RV maintenance and cleaning.
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| We followed him for a while until we could safely pass. |
After lunch, we drove about 20 miles on I80 west to catch Iowa scenic route 44 west, going through some pretty hill country and enjoying some rural sights, eventually reaching the Loess (pronounced Luss) Hills area near the Nebraska border.
The Loess Hills are made of wind-blown silt and the only other place in the world this type of geological formation exists is in China.
As we approached the area, we saw the hilly farms were terraced, probably to avoid erosion. Eventually, we learned from some roadside reader boards that the terraces were not man-made, but were the result of the natural erosion process of the silted hills.
They described the hills as pie crust like and we could see soft hills that were deeply terraced as well as sharp ridges. We drove to an observation deck in the Pisgah forest on a dirt road where the ridge line was more pronounced. Most of the area is either planted with corn or used as range land for livestock. We learned that Iowa has the largest percentage of actively farmed land in the United States. But in some protected areas, the native prairie grasses are encouraged. There are over 300 different species of native grasses and wildflowers that make up the prairie and they grow so thick, tree seeds cannot get to the soil to germinate.
We spent the night in a small town on the Nebraska border which had a nice clean laundry room where I spent a couple hours.
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