The Sioux City Journal‘s Tim Gallagher drove US 20 recently to check out a motel being torn down near Correctionville, and mentioned one planned for US 20/59 at Holstein.
Mom-and-pop motels are nowhere near as prevalent as they used to be, often limited to intersections not worth even a Super 8 and large tourist traps (Wisconsin Dells, Orlando).
Elsewhere on the SCJ’s site is a much more entertaining story/photo collection: Cats in Hats!
Story from Iowa Farmer Today. Busing, both in terms of time for students and gasoline costs, has significant effects on rural districts’ budgets.
You know how, when new products come out that are worse than the old ones, or are incompatible, or are inextricably linked with “the cloud”, or just plain don’t do what the old one does, the rebuttal is “you don’t have to use it”?
Well, here’s another piece of evidence against that rebuttal, because eventually, you don’t have a choice:
Soon, the updated version of Google Maps will become your desktop Maps experience. You’ll no longer be able to use the older, classic Google Maps.
The classic Google Maps, i.e., the one that works. The one without zillions of squares. The one that lets me type “from: CID to: la crosse wi to: mankato mn to: CID”, knows exactly what I mean, and creates a route accordingly. The one that doesn’t suck up the CPU to zoom in on Street View. And the one that works in Safari for Mac OS 10.6.8. As of Tuesday, GMaps defaults to “lite” mode, but chews up CPU cycles and no longer has zoom levels on the scale, just plus/minus.
For the moment, iPhoto Places appears to be unaffected (but still has the long-standing map-jumping issue). If anything happens to that I’m going to be furious.
This isn’t an unexpected situation, given that the 2014-19 plan did not have any entries for it, but finishing making US 30 four lanes in Tama and Benton counties won’t start until 2020 at the earliest, reports the Cedar Valley Times.
The news in the short bit would be that the part in Tama County could be done first, even though it is the much hillier half, because ROW acquisition is moving along.
I’ve mentioned before that this new 30 would run just south of the existing road in Benton County, and just north of the existing road in Tama County. I did not point out a very big practical reason a four-lane has to be all-new: The current two-lane has a milled rumble strip on the centerline, intended to prevent head-on collisions. (Although I see no reason why the pavement couldn’t be ripped up and the new roadbed built in the same place. *shrug*)
The title above is a nonpartisan version of a Washington Post blog entry, “The Democrats’ white-voter problem — in 2 maps”. The two maps in question are county-by-county preferences for the last four presidential elections (two won by G.W. Bush, two by Barack Obama), and county-by-county trends for Bill Clinton’s two elections vs. Obama’s.
On the first map, most of Iowa is part of a collection of counties in the Upper Midwest that has either waffled between parties or been solidly Democratic (Gore-Kerry-Obama-Obama). US 169 is a decent boundary for this. Overall, only six counties have mirrored the national electoral vote and split 2-2 during that time period (although not necessarily in the same way): Allamakee, Bremer, Greene, Marshall, Union, and Winnebago. Eight more have mirrored the national popular vote and split 3-1 for the Democrat, including Cedar, which ended Election Day 2000 in a tie but gave a 2-vote edge to Gore in the final canvass. Fourteen went 3 R, 1 D. The remaining 71 counties are split between solid D or R, with the former concentrated in the eastern part of the state and the latter in the west.
The Clinton-Obama map brings a lot more blue, light red, and neutral to the state. Guthrie County is the tip of a triangle-ish or hooked-T-shaped area of the country running south to the Gulf of Mexico and east through Tennessee into western Pennsylvania that split those four elections (’92, ’96, ’08, ’12) two and two party-wise. In that map, Grundy, Humboldt, Madison, and Warren are the only counties on or east of US 169 that went Republican all four times, the direct opposite of what happened nationally.
The Waterloo Courier had a piece Sunday interviewing Gladbrook residents and business owners about what they thought was going to happen to the town after the school closes next month. Some acknowledged what Gladbrook is up against, but the paragraph of no-comments says just as much.
In the interest of trying to find a bright side, here’s a plug to the Gazette’s visit to Gladbrook a month ago.
April 25, 2005: The “east” or “south” end of IA 152, right at Osceola’s north city limits. (Can’t believe this picture is a decade old.)
Jason Hancock has been checking the status of signs for IA 152 on a regular basis. The signs were taken down in the first half of April, most likely April 1, despite a decommissioning back in July and 152’s absence from the online county map since late last year. Jason’s speculation that this was about snow removal is a likely explanation, and possibly also because there was construction on its bridge over I-35 last year.
The decommissioning of IA 152, one of the shortest highways in the state even before the Second Great Decommissioning, leaves three numbers in Clarke County (I-35, US 34, and US 69). It was the second time the number was used in the county, relocated from being the spur to Murray.
Dec. 29, 2012: Text of monument for the 14th Iowa at Shiloh National Battlefield. A recap of my visit can be found here.
A program at the Traer Museum at 7:20 tonight will honor Tama County’s “Wolf Creek Rangers” of the Civil War, the Waterloo Courier reports. The Rangers were among the Iowa farm boys who fought in the “Hornets Nest” part of the Battle of Shiloh.
For $1. The building’s new owners intend to keep it and turn it into apartments, and make the gym available to the public.
