Monday, August 9, 2010

August 3, 2010: Bellevue to Sabula, IA. 23 miles.


Since rain was predicted, several of our paddlers got rooms at the town hotel, above. We chose to stay in our tent as planned. The rain came in about 2 AM and lasted until 5 or so... it quit in time to take the tents down and put them away wet. The wake up music this morning was Carole King singing "I can see clearly now, the rain is gone....". It's always a treat to hear what music Jim chooses for us... The second song was the Traveling Wilburys singing about "Last night"--referring of course to the bar party that we did not attend.

Bill wore his Bellevue Victims shirt today--we made a donation to the fund set up to help those injured and killed in the July 4 parade stampede.

Bill and I got a ride down to the boat in the wagon pulled by this restored John Deere tractor. It reminds me of the one we had when I was a kid--you had to manually turn the fly wheel to start it. Pictured with the tractor is Dave, who did the restoration. (This is for you Jim--see what you can do with our old one!).



The water in the river is still very high--many of the usual stopping places along the route are flooded over. We stopped at 3 miles into the paddle--we could still see lock 12 at our stop, and then stopped again at 18 miles into it. You can believe that I was squirming sitting that long in the boat! I did not, however, resort to swigging Tequila like Val, Gary and Jan...


We had a circuitous route into Sebula since we had to go all the way around the levee to get into our camping spot. Sebula used to be part of the Iowa mainland, but became an island when lock 13 was built at Clinton, and is Iowa's only island city. The entire boat dock was closed to traffic while we were there, which was quite a treat. We left all the boats on the grass and pavement right next to the dock.


It was extremely hot and humid today, but breezy enough to dry the tent when we put it up. This last photo shows a bunch of Rumblers trying to cool off in the slough. Too bad you can't hear the sound effects--they were barking like seals and calling themselves a "pod". Guess you had to be there.

1 comment:

Lynn Peters said...

Wait, what? I'm sure that I paddled Tuesday, but missed the 'seals' AND the tequila. Hmmph. Found this while googling this year's trip- thanks for the blog and the pics, they are great! Already jonesing for next year's Rumble, hoping for the Missouri- a long drive but hear that it's georgeous (and a nice swift current :) Lynn