Monday, October 6, 2014

Altoona, IA - Friends and Relatives

This campground is unusual in the types of campers who stay here. Half of the campground is full of people who work at the local horse track, they have saddles in their RV’s, their kids ride their bikes through the campground hitting them with a crop just like their jockey dads and there are horse decals on many of the RV’s. 1/4 of the rest are people who work on other jobs around the area, some on the new Facebook data center about a mile away and others on pipeline projects in the next town. The last 1/4 are those like us who are full-timers from Iowa and want to be near home during the summer.

We met a young kid named Chad whose father works on those really high electrtic lines that go through states. He travels with his parents being home-schooled. (Any kid who can use the word ‘decorative panel’ in a complete sentence is being well schooled.) He does wish that they might have a house some day and that there were more kids his age in the parks his parents stay at. Meanwhile he makes friends with whomever he meets here (even old fogies like Gary and me). He would like to have a new electric car and his father has told him that he has to earn half of the expense. However, it is difficult to find work for a 10-yr old in an RV park so I told him that he should make up a flyer telling others what he might do. He didn’t seem to think the idea would work but 5 minutes later, he’s back at our door with his flyer.
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He put his site number at the bottom so his parents could check out all those who came for his services.

Meanwhile Gary and I did have some chores for him - moving all the wood we had taken off our floor to the trash container. Here he is getting his pay from Gary - he eyes are pretty wide - he must think we gave him too much.
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Gary has two sisters, one, Cathy, who lives with her husband, Tom, in Johnston a few miles away and whom we see all the time.
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Another, Dawn who lives with her husband, Tom lives about 2 hours away and we see them very seldom. Cathy decided that we ought to have a reunion with just the adults and arranged it all. We all had a great time talking over lunch, a walk afterwards and then a dinner in the evening. What marvelous fun. Here are the guys and then the women.
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After the high school reunion a while back, we stayed an extra day to tour around and visit some of Gary’s aunts and uncles who still lived in the area. We stopped at Marian and Alley’s home to visit with them. Alley has had several forms of cancer but is still alive and kicking and looking for more. Several days ago, he rode his lawn mower out to mow some grass in the ditch between the road and some fields. He got stuck, walked back to the house and he and Marian drove the car out to pull the lawn mower out of the ditch. On the other hand, they are tired of visiting doctor offices all the time.
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We heard some pounding noise off in the distance and walked out to visit with Darrel, one of their sons who is taking down an old shed before it falls down.
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Then it was off to see Delores in Vincent. Her daughter, Renee, was visiting and they were doing some canning.
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Finally, it was time to head on home. We had picked up a fall arrangement for the Macek graves that Cathy had ordered and put it on before we left the area.
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I took another picture of the small country cementery. One of the prominent names in Vincent is Dencklau and you can see that in the cemetery. I can actually see 6 stones with the name ‘Dencklau’ on them: 2 on the left, 3 in the middle row and 1 on the right. Believe me when I tell you that there are many other Dencklaus spread throughout the cemetery. Only one Macek.
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