Green Valley State Park, Iowa - July 1st to 3rd, 2021
Curiosity keeps us moving and exploring. What may seem mundane to some people, becomes more interesting when you notice and contemplate the little things around you.
On Thursday, we drove from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Green Valley State Park in Iowa. To avoid some of the interstate driving, we took US 75 from Sioux City, Iowa to Blair, Nebraska. US 75 was listed as a scenic drive in our road atlas. Besides, it was in Nebraska and our Red Tail Lodge had not been in the state of Nebraska yet. The highway was a pleasant drive through rolling farmland. It passed through the Winnebago Indian Reservation as well as the Omaha Indian Reservation along with a handful of small towns.
For our picnic lunch, we found a nice picnic shelter in Ralph Steyer Park in Blair, Nebraska. Afterwards, we wandered over to Butch’s Deli for ice cream. RB had her usual scoop of mint chocolate chip and scoop of chocolate while LB has his usual vanilla shake. It was lunch time and the place was pretty busy for a quiet little town. If the rest of their food is like their ice cream, it should be pretty good.
We arrived at Green Valley State Park a little after 3 pm. Google Maps routed us down a handful of miles on gravel roads to get there. We were able to go right to our camp site despite their late check-in time of 4 pm. Their check-out time is 3 pm, but no one was in our site. There was no campground map and we couldn’t make sense of the site numberings, so we just drove around until we found our site number. We had an electric site right on the lake shore at the end next to the parking for the three cabins further down the shoreline in a little cove. We had a view of the little cove, but the main view of the lake was blocked by the large RV in the site next to ours. We did have a nice view of the sunset, though.
Seeing clover and lightning bugs again brought back memories of our childhoods, growing up in Ohio. We don’t have the clover and fireflies in Colorado. We both have fond memories of spending hours as children catching the flashing bugs and putting them in a glass jar, punching holes in the metal lid to let air in.
As we made our evening stroll around the campground, we noticed that we were the only ones from out of state and the only ones camping in a van. There were a handful of open sites, but the tickets on their site posts indicated they were reserved the rest of the weekend starting the next day, Friday. It looks like we’ll have a full house for the 4th of July weekend.
We spent Friday morning, working and relaxing. Yes, we put those two words in the same sentence. LB worked on sewing the magnets back on the bottom of the side screen while RB edited the next video.
In the afternoon, RB took Little Buddy (our kayak - paid link) out on the lake. The sign said that the west arm of the lake was for water skiing, so she encircled the shore of the east side of the lake. There were not many boats out on the lake, just a couple of boats with people fishing. What struck her as odd was the lack of water birds. There were lots of other birds in the trees along the shore, chirping away, but not a single water bird on or in the water. No herons, no ducks, no geese, no loons, nothing. Was that a reflection of the water quality of the lake? The lake is shallow, with lots of debris near the shore, like brush piles, along with slime and algae. There was a sign indicating that they were monitoring E Coli and the blue-green algae of the lake. Was runoff from the surrounding farmland affecting the water quality of the lake? Just to make her feel better, RB took a thorough shower after she was done kayaking.
After watching the sunset again from our camp site, a handful of kayaks came out on the lake, decorated with colorful lights. What a fun idea!
We started having issues with our inverter/charger in Sioux Falls when we were plugged into shore power and had the air conditioner running. The errors continued at Green Valley State Park. The errors were indicating things like OVP (over voltage), PTOC (pulling too much current from the inverter), and OLP (loads are too high for the inverter output). This was the first real test of running the air conditioner since we installed the lithium batteries. The inverter/charger would shutdown, not only shutting off the air conditioner, but also shutting off the power to the fridge. We tried changing some of the settings like the absorption and float voltages in addition to the shore power max. The air conditioner kicked off in the middle of the night. It was cool enough by then that we could disconnect from shore power and run the fans off the batteries for the rest of the night. However, we need to figure this out. It is only going to get hotter and more humid as the summer progresses, so air conditioning would be nice to have. We’re thinking of converting the fridge over to DC power to get it off of the inverter. This may or may not solve the issue, but at least we won’t have to worry about our food spoiling.
Saturday morning, we hiked around the lake before the temperatures got too high. It was in the 70’s, with humidity to match, above 70%. We quickly became soaked in sweat. Living in Colorado with low humidity, we are not accustomed to being sweaty, slimy and sticky. We better get used to it because we have over four months of high humidity until we get back home.
As we started out on the trail, we passed one of the docks in the campground. There was a fishing clinic going on for kids that morning, complete with door prizes. There were about a dozen kids participating, all lined up along the dock and down the shoreline.
Half of the trail around the lake is paved concrete. The other half is a wide mowed strip of grass. Thank goodness we had the All Trails app with us because the two trails did not exactly connect to each other. We followed the road about half a mile after the paved path ended to find where the grass trail began. For us, both trails combined was 9.2 miles with an elevation gain of 249 feet which we completed in three hours and 45 minutes. We counted this as hike #24 of our 52 Hike Challenge.
There were plenty of wildflowers along the trail to keep RB’s shutter finger busy. Butterflies were enjoying the flowers as well. The tree tops were filled with birds who were chatty the whole morning long.
Starting at the campground, there was a “Story Walk” for the first mile. The local library had sign posts every hundred feet or so. Each sign contained the next page of a children’s book. What a great idea! We could imagine it being great motivation for the book worm kid to walk a mile. On the other hand, it might encourage the hyper-active kid to read as they could read in short bursts with movement in-between.
As we were waling along the concrete path, a small clump of dirt hopped. Wait a minute, that is a toad! Back when we were hiking at Colter Bay in Grand Teton National Park, we thought we had seen the smallest toad, about an inch long. The toad at Green Valley was about a quarter of that size.
There were quite a few raspberry bushes along the path. Or at least we thought they were raspberry bushes. Then we saw some that were trees, about thirty feet tall. Raspberry bushes don’t grow that big, do they? We found out they were mulberry trees. The fruit is edible, but we were not daring enough to try any.
The afternoon was spent relaxing at our camp site and trying to figure out the issue with our inverter/generator. LB read some Facebook posts in the VanDOit owner’s group about others having similar issues. Matt and Kurt have also replaced their AGM batteries with Lion’s lithium batteries (paid discount link). Matt contacted GoPower about the error codes he was getting. GoPower said they had a firmware upgrade to fix the issue, but that required shipping the inverter/charger to them. They also suggested changing some settings to help. GoPower suggested setting the absorption to 14V, float to 13.6V, and lower the charging rate to 30% initially, then slowly raise it to 50% or 60% as long as the error does not return. Instead, we just tried setting the charging rate from 80 % to 50%. That worked the rest of the day until we went to bed. Then we had another OLP error. We lowered the charging rate even further, down to 30%, which got us through the night with the air conditioning running. An error popped up a couple of times, but cleared itself instead of shutting down.
We had a great time at Green Valley. It is probably not a destination for those outside of Iowa, but we found it to be a pleasant stop along our route.
Check out our related video: Green Valley State Park, Iowa
(RB)