Oh, February...

Winter has been bittersweet for the trail crew, with some really fun experiences as well as some awful ones.  Many of the past few weeks we've been prevented from working by the weather, which only makes collaborating as a team that is spread over 300 miles that much more difficult.  Some highlights in the past few weeks were:
MLK Day at the Iowa State Capitol, where we got an awesome tour of the most amazing building I've ever seen (HELLO Davenport schools, forget Chicago, you need to take your kids on field trips here!!), got to participate in various service projects (including serving meals for the homeless at Hope Cafe, part of Bethel Mission... very clean kitchen, very friendly staff, and the food even looked good!) and got to meet with our legislators... mine (Phyllis Thede) worked in my high school library so it was great to see her again!

 

House of Representatives

  

House of Representatives' ceiling... WOW

   

Up in the dome... need a tour to get up here :)

 

Looking down from the dome... HUGE drop!

  

They look like paintings...

  

But are actually mosaics!  Some pieces are smaller than the tip of your pinkie finger!

  

The Law Library... yes you are looking at five stories of books! 

  

Exterior shot

  

We had to cut the day short due to an impending ice storm... and it's a good thing we did!  It hit Ames hard, and we woke up the next morning to over a half inch of solid ice on our cars... and I actually caused a lot of damage to mine in trying to get it off :(

 

  

 

The tire is literally frozen to the ground!

  

Poor trees...

  

Despite the awful weather, we did manage to make a lot of headway back at Waubonsie on the former tent pads:

 

Adam painting balusters--easier to paint before you put them on!

  

Cutting out the stairs!

  

Delilah cutting more balusters from a reclaimed 2x4

  

Ceith and Ewan cutting more pieces for the stairs 

  

Matt (Waubonsie staff) and Ceith installing some reclaimed counters in the WaShawtee shop to give us more workspace!

Ceith working on the railing on one of the tentpads

  

99% finished... just needs some balusters for the railing, and a nice coat of paint! 

Delilah, Ewan and Ceith made it to a rescheduled training day in Cedar Rapids for the Iowa Commission on Volunteer Services (ICVS) where we met up with some other DNR/Keepers of the Land Americorps volunteers, as well as got to meet Americorps volunteers from other programs such as Habitat for Humanity, Each One Reach One, and Green Iowa, to name a few.  For our service project we helped move Theatre Cedar Rapids back to their original building downtown which sustained major flood damage and has been restored beautifully.  They were stoked to have 30+ people move their boxes, and we were happy to do it.  It's amazing what you can accomplish with a decent amount of people.  Although we hit a minor snag when we heard our cars would be towed back in Iowa City, we moved them in time and were able to fully enjoy the day.  Here are some photos from a team building activity in which we had a limited amount of time (15 minutes?  20?) to build a self-supporting structure that would contain all team members out of only newspaper and tape:

 

Delilah and Ceith's structure that just couldn't support itself... 

  

This team won two awards... awesome! 

  

Ewan's team on the left won "Most Fashionable" 

The bitter part of our winter involves mostly cars.  Ceith's car is basically totaled from an interstate pileup (in which he also chipped a tooth), Adam sustained major damages to his car in an accident, Delilah's been through two flat tires, unknowingly caused major paint damage by ice scraping, and also was towed in Iowa City (yes, after the runaround to move them, it got towed the very next morning)--all of these things happened en route to work.  We have yet to encounter a week that isn't started late, cut short, or blown altogether by weather and its effect on our cars, but here's hoping it's behind us now.  Already a storm has kept us in today, but hopefully tomorrow Ewan, Ceith and I can join Adam and our boss Michael so we can go to Green Valley State Park and start on a big project.


And our sincere apologies to Joan at Pleasant Creek State Park, we were scheduled to do invasive species removal (a favorite winter activity of ours) and that week was the one with two accidents and the tow.   We do look forward to helping you out at a later date!