We could not have been more wrong. Our plan was to head to Morgan Creek, a wonderful county park near Cedar Rapids, on Wednesday morning to get sites. I should mention here that it has become commonplace for some people to haul their campers to such a park early in the week and pay for a site for an extra four or five days in order to have a spot for the weekend. Many such places look like RV dealers at those times with sites full of unoccupied campers. On Tuesday of this week, we began to consider that possibility and made a plan that one person would head to Morgan Creek at 7:00 am Wednesday, grab three sites, pay for them, and put a very small tent on each until we could get there with our actual equipment midday. Meanwhile, I would wait at home for a call that either said "Got 'em!" or "nothing here." If the latter, I would head to Saulsbury Bridge fifteen miles away. Meanwhile, the other person would stop at Palisades on the other side of Cedar Rapids and check on the walk-in sites there. The result was that by 8:30 am, we knew that there were no sites left at any of those places.
However, the night before Butch had been looking at a few commercial parks on line. Among those was the Amana Colonies RV Park. We normally shy away from commercial parks. They are more expensive and often do not have grass, trees, grills of fire rings--they are nothing more than parking lots with hook ups. This one is definitely short on trees and is basically a huge field with hundreds of sites laid out in rows. But we really wanted to camp and besides we already had our campers filled with food and clothes. So as soon as I found Saulsbury full, I called Butch and he called Amana, snagging three reserved sites. We were disappointed but only had ourselves to blame.