Monday, May 9, 2011 - Clarinda IA
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Power & Light, Hastings NE, May 8, 2011
Oh shit...
This has been an interesting day. Clarinda IA and Nodaway Valley Park is not where I expected to be spending the night. Some days even the vaguest of plans go awry.
Some time early in the sweltering hot humid afternoon I pulled off the road for a pee break and to refill my water cup. Funny smell in the bathroom - guess the airflow has reversed for some reason. It happens. Ah well.
I pull back onto the road and hear a funny scraping noise, look in the mirror and see a scrape in the dirt and a small dust cloud where I left the verge.
Back to the verge I go.
Yikes! - the leading edge of the black water tank dropped and is dragging on the ground. This ain't gonna be fun - as luck would have it that black tank is darned near full. That's about 20 gallons and a hundred and fifty pounds of stuff now vastly complicating this little problem.
Stay tuned
I have long had an uncanny way of getting out of tight spots on the road - I have many many such stories from my long distance motorcycling days - now there's another to add to the growing list of RVing tight spot stories.
Night camp
Site 9 - Nodaway Valley Park, Clarinda IA
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - slow extended service
- Locate Nodaway Valley Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.