Amana, Iowa Part 1

We left Kansas City just in time!  Bad weather had moved in and it chased us almost all the way to Amana, Iowa.

 

One word describes Iowa--CORN!  On our drive we saw miles and miles of corn, gently rolling hills of cornfields as far as the horizon.  Turns out that last year Iowa grew 2.5 billion bushels of corn on 13 million acres of land.  At 56 lbs/bushel that's over 140 billion lbs of corn.  WOW!  Less than 1% is sweet corn for the table.  The rest is field corn for fuel, feed, and thousands of other everyday products.

 We arrived at the Amana RV Park and guess what it's surrounded by--CORN!

 

 

 

 

 

This RV park is huge!  It spans over 60 acres with 462 RV sites.  Takes over 30 hours to mow!  When we arrived there weren't a lot of  RVs here.  As it got closer to Labor Day weekend people started coming in for a dog show that was going to be held at the RV Event Center.  Apparently almost every weekend there is an event here.  The first weekend we were here there was a Wood Fest--a festival of wood and everything made of wood.  Some upcoming September events are Dog Gone Devils Fall Fly Ball (which is dogs chasing balls for prizes), a rocks and minerals show, and some RV rallies.

The owners of the show dogs put up their own fences and some even had covers on them.

Amana Colonies is made up of 7 villages built and settled in 1856 by German Pietists who were persecuted in their homeland by the government and by the Lutheran Church.  They lived a communal lifestyle until the mid 1930s.  For 80 years the Amana Colonies maintained an almost completely self-sufficient local economy until the financial circumstances caused by the Great Depression caused them to change.  Today it is listed as a National Historical Landmark and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.  Amana colony is the largest of the colonies.  It has many shops, restaurants, bakeries, chocolate shops, antique stores, a fabric/quilt shop, a woolen mill that is still in operation, a furniture store where they still make furniture and clocks, and a meat market. There is a bike path near the RV park that goes around Lily Lake and into Amana.  We bike there almost every day and walk around the colony.  It is a restful, peaceful place.  Other colonies have a blacksmith shop, general stores, communal kitchen where the residents of the colonies gathered to eat their meals, and a cooper shop.

On September 4 there was a Festival of Iowa Beers sponsored by the Iowa Brewers Guild.  This is an annual event held in Amana.  They had over 30 breweries--John was like a kid in a candy store! The weather was beautiful--high around 80.  We heard that last year the high was 100!  Glad we weren't here then!  We've been told that its been unseasonably cool with highs in the upper 70s and lows in the mid-50s.  We are expecting a few rainy, warm days with highs in upper 80s.

 

 

Coasters from Different Brewers