Forest City, IA

The last few days have been in driving mode. We have traveled from Oshkosh, WI to Forest City, IA. Fall color is fair, doesn’t seem to be a good year for color at least up here. At a rest stop we finally found some good fall color.

We are in Forest City to visit the Winnebago plant. Surprising there is no wifi in the Winnebago cg. We need to go to the visitor center to pick up wifi. There is also no cell phone service but we seem to be in a pocket. We went to dinner and had cell phone service about 2-3 miles away. 

Our leveler jacks decided to act up and one would not go all the ways down, luckily we are by Winnebago. I went to Customer Service and explained our problem, told us to come back at 2:30 to see when they could fit us in. Went back to the MH and finished setting up. Knock on the door, they can fit us in at 1:30 today. It is now 1:20. We quickly packed up and drove over. 2 hours later all fixed. I found out the MH leveler system, which is automatic but can be manually overridden(which I did-site was not very level), got itself out of calibration by my forcing it to be almost level. Winnebago re-calibrated the system and all is well. No charge. Nice!

On our drive to Sioux City we had some of the best roads we have ever encountered in all our years of driving the country. The roads did not look new but were in pristine shape. 

We are seeing a lot of windmills in driving through IA. We have never seen a windmill being built but today we did. 

Some observations of the last few days:

Hardees and A&W are very popular fast food stops in WI and IA. Very few McDonald's.

Forest City, population of 4000: 2 restaurants_a Hardee; 8 gas stations all able to gas a MH; home of Winnebago(hires half the town)

Brett,IA: has a Hobo Museum and a Hobo Convention each year!!

IA: just like IN, barns have pictures of quilts on them, have no idea where or why this trend started

We are traveling a lot of back roads and find it a very interesting experience. 

We are now in Sioux City at a city cg on the river, great location.

Discovered the car needed tires. We had hoped to make it back to Wmbg before needing tires, wasn't to be. Called Sams Club, they have tires and I could even make an appt. That will be this mornings project. Once completed food shopping will be in order as I want to have enough basics to make it to Phoenix. 

Tomorrow we will visit the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, tour the Jolly Time Popcorn Museum and take the Palmer Candy Factory Tour.


After this on to Pender, NE to get a part installed on the MH and pick up mail and packages. Then we need to make a decision of how to get to Santa Fe. This will be forecast weather dependent. Do we go west then south or south then west? 


Santa Fe will be our last touring stop. From there we will go straight to Phoenix and settle in for the winter.