Linder Point Campground, Coralville Lake, Iowa City, Iowa ; June 17-24, 2013

Coralville Lake was another Corps of Engineers park and a beautiful one. We stayed at a small  
campground within the park – Linder Point – and we enjoyed our time there. While there, we visited

An Amish horse and buggy

the Kalona Colony (an Amish settlement) and found some wonderful cheese and baked goods, a great bulk grocery store, and beautifully crafted clothing. Horse-drawn carts were common there, and not all houses had electricity.
 

 We also spent several hours wandering through the Amana Colony, where we found stores with many kinds of handmade   All pieces of furniture were made by one of the seven craftsmen (two of whom were women) and only one craftsman worked on an item, then signed it when completed.  I’m still lusting after a couple of the pieces we saw while there.  [She’ll lust for a long time, the least expensive kitchen chair we saw was over $700.RP]

items – some beautiful woven blankets, all sorts of kitchen items, toys, several specialty food shops with lunch counters, and the most beautiful furniture either of us had ever seen.

One of the interesting things about Coralville Lake was the Divonian fossil Gorge that had been uncovered during the floods the summer of 1993 when water poured over the emergency spillway at Coralville Lake and eroded a deep channel into the underlying bedrock deposits. It is now possible to walk across acres of Devonian-age (around 375 million years ago) sea floors and get a first-hand look at features normally hidden from view or glimpsed only in vertical cuts along roadsides or in quarries.

We spent one evening with Sue and Jim, talking about our time at QTP and catching up on the years since we’ve seen each other.  It was great to see them both and the evening went by all too quickly.

One of the blades of a windmill

From here, we’ll have a series of three one-night stopovers, then to Pennsylvania.