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| I was there yesterday afternoon. The main "road" in and out of visitor parking is mud. No alfalfa left after 50,000 round trips. Yesterday morning the back up was reported to reach Ames about 16 miles. You can't drive to the site at 65 mph and drive across a hay field at more than 15 or 20 and survive when its dry. I remember one at Amana the third morning the parking area was so rutted from rain the days before that I had to drive at the absolute minimum speed my truck would do or my camper would have been airborne. That year they had motor homes sitting on their belly pans.
By 2:30 when I arrived the highway was dotted with mud about a half inch deep from those departing from sort of dried mud.
Parking is abysmal, it took me more than an hour 24 minutes to drive from a parking spot to the highway starting just before 5 PM. Only one dinky two lane road temporarily one way can't handle all that traffic that is only allowed to use ONE gate. When I finally got close to the gate at 6:22 PM, the horse back traffic patrols and the highway patrol on the highway were swinging their arms to speed up. At 20 mph, I was half airborne going across the rutted alfalfa that had been planted into cultivated corn without rolling and then had been driven on wet. There were many unhappy folks. I was so stiff when I got to Boone from that short trip that I felt like I had driven a couple hundred miles. And my gas gauge was down 1/8th tank.
The last NWS forecast I listened to on NOAA radio a few hours ago called for thundershowers to stay south of I-80 for the afternoon and move up to stay just south of US 30 for the evening. That detail depends on where the front stalls and starts moving back north. Details the models do very poorly on.
The Van Wall Show just east of FPS was good on a farm with a huge private tractor collection. I left it as the storm arrived, drove to Ellsworth in a frog strangler rain. My rain gauge shows about 2.5" this morning while NWS radar storm total show me more like 1.5 or 2. It shows Boone at 2 to 2.5" overnight.
There was a neglect on the show grounds of making booth entryways reach all the way to the graveled roads so there was a couple feet of mud to cross each place. They might learn someday. The graveled roads are not crowned, they are ditched so there's a wet streak down them, sometimes in the middle.
I didn't find the place crowded, though I arrived after 2:30, the people density was higher in the streets than in the tents and booths that I visited. And every vendor that I visited was happy to talk their product and farming in general. That part of the show was great, the parking and departure a %*(*^&*&^@@#!$~~**)(*&^% mess which for now makes me say I won't ever go again.
I doubt a 4x4 without all out mud race gear will be sure this morning. E.g. with less than 36" tires and a 2 foot lift.
Gerald J. | |
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FPS DELAYED by 2 hours due to heavy rains
