Making our way out of LeClaire and the Buffalo Bill Museum, we ended up on I-80 going around the Quad Cities. With no one but Kate knowing our exact destination, the rest of us breathed a sigh of relief as we drove past the World's Largest Truck Stop, and everyone (except maybe Chris) breathed an even longer sigh of relief when we failed to stop at the Herbert Hoover birthplace museum.
After a quick pit stop in Iowa City, we ventured down some country roads that seemed to get progressively smaller. With only minor trepidation as we passed the "Dead End" sign and the "Highway Closed" sign, we found ourselves at our next destination: Coralville Lake. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a dam there in the mid-20th century, creating a large reservoir. During the great flood in 1993, the dam overflowed, and the service road was flooded and destroyed. This turned out to have an unexpected upside: it revealed the Devonian Fossil Gorge, full of fossilized fish and shells. We spent some time exploring the fossil bed. The dam itself survived the flood intact, and we marvelled at how high the river must have been in 1993 to spill over the dam - there were full grown trees in the shadow of the dam that would have been completely submerged by the flooding.
Coralville Lake also had a nice picnic area where we stopped for a lunch of cold cuts, fruit, and granola bars. There wasn't time to play a round on their disc golf course, but as we headed off to Beets's destination, we watched a player lose his disc deep in the woods.
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