I want to thank my friend Bob for recommending this campground. If you are ever in northern Illinois I recommend this as well. We have been here about a month now and it has been a blast. They have events almost daily with a dance/party virtually every weekend. Lakefront campground with fishing, paddle boats, an arcade and nice big pool. The kids have made a great friend here named Caleb (Bob's grandson) and they have been having sleepovers and tons of fun in general. We had a great barbecue and we've seen many interesting things in the area. We are planning a trip into Chicago soon and I'm sure that will be pretty awesome. We're also planning a trip to the Wisconsin Dells to the biggest water park in the country!
Well hopefully we just got past the scariest part of our trip but I guess we'll see... We came very close to our journey ending in the last couple of days. We have been staying at a beautiful park with a river running through it that apparently spills over it's banks and floods occasionally. The Friday morning before we were planning to leave for Illinois we were awoken to the sounds of tornado sirens. Oh great another thunderstorm (one of many, many storms over the past weeks) we better get out of our trailer and head to a safer place we thought. So we woke the kids grabbed the dogs and headed for my sister-in-laws. After a few hours the rain had subsided so I decided to head back to the trailer to grab a few things like my phone charger and some other stuff we forgot in the rush of leaving that morning. When I pulled into the park this is the sight that greeted me. By the time I got back to the park and saw what was happening, it was too late. The fire department was not letting anyone else in and the fate of our home was left to chance. I left to give the bad news to Jenny, after dinner we returned to find the water had risen another 6-8 feet. We went to bed that night with the certainty that our trip was over and that we would be heading home with our heads hung low. We spent the night at Melanny's talking about insurance claims and replacing our belongings. We returned in the morning to survey the damage, unfortunately my attempt to reach the trailer by boat was too dangerous due to the current, so we had to wait another agonizing day for the water to recede some more. On the second day we were able to wade in and the water was dropping rapidly. To our utter amazement the trailer was not flooded. There were many others who were not so lucky...probably 3-4 trailers and several vehicles were a total loss. We happened to be parked on the highest spot in the park, had we been in any other site we would have lost our house on wheels.
It was a long day in the mud trying to get everything cleaned up and ready to pull our trailer out of the park but we were so happy we still had a trailer it was a fun day all in all. If/when we return to Iowa we will not be staying at this park. |
Author'sStephen Buck (35) Archives
November 2014
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