The DOT has an online meeting for a small project on US 169: “installation of traffic signals at the I-80 ramp terminals along with turn lanes.” This is on the north side of the town of De Soto, and based on a quick look, it appears that these are the first stoplights in town.
The turn lane, as seen on the PDF, is mostly about southbound 169 (from Adel) to westbound 80. That would also be the US 6 traffic movement.
Pavement markings and cleanup on IA 58 at the Viking Road interchange in Cedar Falls were to be done earlier this week, a DOT press release says. I was a skeptic that it could be done, even when they said it would be a tight SPUI. I was wrong.
Semi-relatedly, in the northeast corner, the “Doughy Joey’s Peetza Joynt” restaurant, is going to be torn down for a Dupaco Credit Union building. This location opened in 2010 and then became the only site after the downtown Waterloo location closed in 2014, according to the Waterloo Courier. The Courier in April was unable to ascertain the future of the business.
The obvious and inevitable, again. It didn’t help that North Tama softball forfeited the rest of the season less than 36 hours earlier after “potential indirect exposure” to COVID-19.
The Winding Stairs Festival Committee hearts couldn’t be more full due to the outpouring support from our incredible community. The decision to cancel the Winding Stairs Festival in 2020 was a tough one, but a necessary one due to several extenuating circumstances. We are comforted knowing our community is not being put in harms way with COVID-19. We look forward to bringing you a better than ever 2021 Winding Stairs Festival. This SUCKS!
At this point, we have to be looking to find an event that will be willing to be the first to resume … if there are any left this year.
I have in the past rambled about my late 2009 desktop iMac and how I was going to ride it until it died.
Well, at 11:53 PM on June 15, it did. Specifically, the hard drive woke from sleep but the monitor did not. Backups are important, kids.
Since then, I’ve been moderately flailing around trying to figure out how to do things I did every day. This involved buying my first HDTV and my first powered USB hub since 2000 (!). A raft of applications I routinely used are inaccessible* and a handful more do work on the MacBook Pro, but can go no further OS-wise. The iPod will never be synced again, and yes, I still have an iPod and will lovingly cuddle it as long as I can.
Then less than two weeks later I whanged my Fitbit against the car and broke the screen. When it rains it pours.
Traditions are still no match for the plague. The latest victims: Pufferbilly Days in Boone and the Knoxville Nationals. But it’s not just the big stuff.
Let’s look just in southern Benton County in the first half of 2018:
That’s a lot of pancakes. But it’s also a lot of money. That’s money for either support of the entity putting it on or for some local group that may be reliant on it. “Social capital” has been eroding for decades, and having community-building events forcibly interrupted will have consequences.
Have you heard how the Sioux Rapids Boosters slickered the smart guys up at Spencer? Well here is the tale.
Sioux Rapids sent a bunch of boosters out in cars to advertise the Fourth of July celebration. Spencer merchants made a bet with them that when they visited the city, no matter what day or time they would not find enough parking space in the city for all their cars (meaning that the town was so busy that parking space was always all filled).
Well the day the boosters started for Spencer some renegade telephoned to Spencer and tipped them off that they were coming. Every Spencer man that owned a car beat it home, drove his machine downtown and parked it and by the time the boosters from Sioux Rapids arrived, Main street was lined on both sides with cars parked at the curb.
Not to be outdone, the Sioux Rapids men made a straight line of their twenty or thirty cars, down the middle of Main street and they extended from the end of the Little Sioux bridge to the Milwaukee depot. And they left them parked there all the time they were in Spencer too. We’ll claim that Sioux Rapids won the bet.
— Storm Lake Register, July 16, 1920 (paragraph breaks added)
Langland Lands Powerful Blows
(Ames Tri-Weekly Tribune, February 19, 1919)
Ole Langland, editor of the Cambridge Leader, takes some awful wallops at Ames people for wanting the Jefferson highway to pass through Ames in place of making the zig-zag through the hills and curves.
There is just no use in Ole getting all peeved up over the matter. He says the people along the Cambridge route have done all that has been asked of them. That they have cut down dangerous hills, filled ditches, etc. It is perfectly right for the good old fiddler to see that his end of the county is kept in apple pie order, and we do not blame him for boosting away that the Jefferson highway should come his way.
But shucks, what’s the use of wasting good print paper and real ink on the subject as far as Ole is concerned. The improved highway as it comes from Cambridge will make a good feeder to the Jefferson highway as it connects with them at Nevada after passing through Ames.
Ole is candid in his article in speaking of the hills, the curves, etc. that lead from Ankeny and that candidness merely spells that the route is very undesirable. Ole says the stretch of road between Canada and New Orleans is via the route leading through Cambridge and the best in the world. But somebody told Ole that was so and that is as far as he knows about it.
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When the primary road system was established soon afterward, IA 1 went from Ankeny to Nevada via Huxley and Ames instead of Elkhart and Cambridge. The official route of the Jefferson Highway changed to the same in 1921.
Please stand by?
Radio Iowa (via KSCJ) reports that Woodbury County will be signing its original US 20 route. This is another step for the Historic Route 20 Association in getting the highway recognized across the country.
The only part of original 20 that overlaps with present 20 in Woodbury County is where the 1958 four-lane was built east of Moville, not counting the frontage road in Moville itself.
In the June letting is a signage project labeled “statewide” but is entirely in Polk County, in two locations: the west and northeast (or east) I-35/80/235 mixmasters. The signs that look like mile markers will say “Ramp” at the top instead of “Mile” and have separate codes for each traffic movement. The codes with comment are as follows:
West Mixmaster
Northeast Mixmaster
I-80 mile 137 is now used in all four directions even though certain ramps can and IMO should be keyed to I-35 (as Exit 87) and I-235 (as Exit 14). This means, for example, “Exit 137A” applies to not only 80’s exit to SB 235, but also NB 235 to EB 80 and SB 35 to EB 80. I-235 is labeled north/south below for travel direction.
The east mixmaster’s ramp signs will have a limited lifespan, if the re-engineering of its design begins in 2023 as scheduled.
