[Speaking of carbonated beverage consumption… – ed.]
When the new US 20 expressway opened in 2012, I noted that it now went from Early to Webster City without any nearby services. Recently, one gas station at the IA 4 exit has sprung up along that gap. It opened June 20.
It’s still a pretty long drive without much on the side of the road, but I’m betting the new spot will provide much-needed relief for many travelers.
Jamie Pollard @IASTATEAD
Transition to Pepsi is completed! @Gatorade is now our official sports drink! Also, @mtn_dew in concession stands.
12:23 PM – 29 Jul 2014
SQUEE!
Now, that’s a qualified squee. Drinks at sporting events are notoriously overpriced. I rarely buy them. But since Coca-Cola has such a chokehold on the industry, this is really welcome news for someone who always has to settle for Sprite. (And not good news as far as my dentist is concerned, but I digress.)
To have the option of buying Mountain Dew or Pepsi when I go to an ISU game is progress. When the ISU campus was Pepsi (until 2012), Jack Trice Stadium and Hilton Coliseum were still Coke-only. I suspect that the concession stand change is merely a side bonus to the primary goal of getting Gatorade for the athletes. A potential hiccup? Bill Fennelly loves his Diet Coke. He may have to pour it into a nondescript cup.
UNI is also a Pepsi campus, including the UNI-Dome and McLeod Center.
UPDATE, noon 7/30: The story on cyclones.com says it’s the athletics department that signed the contract. It doesn’t say anything about the campus. The campus switched from Pepsi to Coke in 2012. There may still be different contracts involved. In that case, qualify the above squee even more. The headline on this blog post has been modified.
There was Iowa State women’s basketball before Bill Fennelly, but it literally wasn’t much to speak of. Lynne Lorenzen once commented that there would be fewer fans at ISU games than when she played six-on-six at Ventura.
Now Fennelly is the dean of Big 12 women’s basketball — and with Bill Snyder’s short retirement, probably the only continuous coaching holdover from the Big Eight. He’s entering his 20th season at ISU. He has three to go before his tenure will cover half of the program’s entire history; his contract runs through 2019. The ISU Athletics Department has written a very nice retrospective about Fennelly’s early years.
He’s led the Cyclones to two Elite Eight berths, five Sweet Sixteens, one regular-season conference championship, and two tournament championships. The attendance at Hilton Coliseum has ranked in the top five for seven years and was second only to Tennessee last season. If there’s a list of “best women’s coaches never to make a Final Four”, Bill Fennelly should be somewhere on it.
December 2001: The west end of IA 100 has looked like this, a half-finished interchange at Edgewood Road in Cedar Rapids, since 1985. That’s going to start changing over the next month. Photo by Jason Hancock.
After seven years, it looks like it’s time to update my IA 100 page. In 2007, I wrote that a western extension might be finished in 2016 (HA), and no changes had been seen at Edgewood Road.
However, the picture attached to this Cedar Rapids Gazette story shows that neither of those are true anymore. Today’s creation of an on-site detour for Edgewood Road at IA 100 is the latest sign of tangible progress for the long-awaited bypass.
The ramps that were built in 1985 will not be a part of the finished expressway; the second SPUI in Iowa will be here instead. The story says there will be “removal and replacement” of the bridge but if you look, it would appear the crossing was just graded earth.
Le Mars’ proposal for modifying the southern part of Business US 75 from a four-lane urban arterial is not something I think has been tried in Iowa. Here’s the plan, from the Le Mars Sentinel:
The proposal would transform the northbound exterior lane into one dedicated to through and right-turn traffic. The northbound interior lane would be dedicated to left turns only. The southbound exterior lane would would be dedicated to right turns only. The southbound interior lane would be dedicated to southbound through traffic and left turns only.
Below is a diagram of what that looks like in street-arrow form. Its asymmetric nature likely springs from the fact that most of that part of Business 75 parallels railroad tracks, cutting the frequency of southbound left turns.
The same Sentinel story also notes that much more of the southern part of Business 75 will have its speed limit cut from 45 to 35 mph. The southern part of the business route is entirely under Le Mars’ jurisdiction now; north of IA 3, it is secret IA 404.
P.S. As of last week, there have been no signage changes on the bypass; the BGSs still list streets instead of “Le Mars,” as the city petitioned the DOT shortly after new 75 opened.
Good news: Hilton Coliseum’s floor was resurfaced. Bad news: The edging now includes the official Twitter handle of ISU Athletics (along with the website), moving the Hilton name to the “bottom” as seen on television. Good news: The Big 12 logo is back on the floor. Bad news: It’s this one (but with gold instead of white):
(Worse news: No more countering with the League of Leaderly Legends [now in Base 14], either. We’ll always have the shirt.)
Dubuque is one of the few places on Iowa’s borders where you can close a bridge across the river and have another one relatively close by. So while the Julien Dubuque Bridge into Illinois is closed until the end of the month, drivers have an involuntary three-state trip on their hands.
KCRG has a story. KWWL timed the trips at between 10 and 20 minutes.
June 4, 2014: Prairie Valley Elementary School (K-4) is not in Farnhamville itself, but rather at the intersection of P41 and D26, a couple miles southeast of Somers. It is one of only two schools in Iowa I am aware of with its own sewage lagoon; the other is West Lyon, halfway between Inwood and Larchwood on IA 182.
When Prairie Valley and Southeast Webster-Grand announced plans for whole-grade sharing, I wondered how geography would be handled, if at all, in the new name. There’s now an answer: vaguely. The schools picked a fragment of each existing name to create “Southeast Valley”, much like “Central Springs” took from North Central of Manly and Nora Springs-Rock Falls. Both are spiritual kin with “West Fork”, SCMT plus Rockwell-Swaledale, and “Easton Valley”, a true portmanteau of East Central and Preston. The sheer size and spread of each district, and the multiple towns involved, make the sense of place looser out of necessity.
The Southeast Valley name is not to be confused with the recent Corning-Villisca merger, which is going by Southwest Valley, referring to its location in the state. “South Webster” could have been problematic for a name because a good chunk of Prairie Valley (including the site photographed at top) is in Calhoun County and the “-Grand” was for the Boxholm-Pilot Mound area in Boone County.
The combined teams will be known as the Jaguars, the second new school in Iowa to take that nickname after Ankeny Centennial. It wouldn’t be the first time for such a coincidence. At the beginning of the decade, we got two separate programs in western Iowa with a purple-black-silver color scheme known as the Titans: South Central Calhoun (2010) and Graettinger-Terril/Ruthven-Ayrshire (2012). I mean, seriously, that’s weird.
The Southeast Valley name got a head start this summer. The Jaguars are playing tonight against Maple Valley-Anthon-Oto for a spot in the state baseball tournament, something that can go a long way for community cohesiveness.
October 3, 2013: Painting at the Neil Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio.
Again, 45 years ago to the minute.
More than 60 percent of Americans alive today were born after the moon landing. (That’s age 44 and under, 2010 census, not an exact analogue but close.) I’m one of them. Will I ever be able to see live footage of an American taking steps on the moon? I’m not too optimistic about that right now.
