Urbana, IA

5/20/09
Our 10 x 14 storage with all our belongings is located in Urbana, Iowa, which is about 20 miles north of Cedar Rapids. When we sold our home and started to look for storage, we found it to be in short supply. Cedar Rapids had just gone through a major flood that destroyed the downtown and hundreds of homes! The home that I owned, before I met Joe, was flooded up to the middle of the picture window on the main floor. My girls met most of their Cedar Rapids friends in this home.

This is a picture of our old home on O Ave., Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Our house was the middle roof in the picture. Two houses from our old house had no flooding. All over town for blocks and blocks and blocks, this is what it looked like but much worse. It is going to take years for Cedar Rapids to recover from this disaster.

Because all storage's were full, we had to store our stuff in Urbana. When we moved our stuff to storage, after we sold our home, we hired two guy and a truck to move it for us. The problem with that, was they were being paid by the hour, and they put everything everywhere, with no order. While on our 7 month road trip, I realized I needed a few things that were packed in storage. We also wanted to see how things were holding up in a non climate control storage. We had planned to spend a day, pulling everything out, reorganizing it, and making a path from front to back, to locate stuff in the future. Our plan was after we left Cedar Rapids, Ia., we would stay at a RV park in Urbana, Ia. But I got a great idea. ( You live with a LaFontaine long enough, and you start to think like one.) I told Joe we should just park the Nest next to our storage, for the day. So that is just what we did. There was electricity on the storage building wall, so we plugged in. The storage owner had told us it was there and we could use it anytime. We opened the storage door, and Joe looked at it, and looked at me, "Are you sure you want to do this," he said. It was a nice sunny day, but a bit windy. I said, "come on we can do it." We were so grateful for the wind, because inside the storage, it got extremely hot. Though, many things that were piled outside kept blowing away or over. Like always I forgot to take a picture when everything was out in front of our storage. We were both totally exhausted when we got done. Don't think we would do that again!

Our spot even had a fountain behind our bus. With our Nest here, we could take a lunch break half way through the project.

We barely got everything back in with no room to spare, with a path from front to back! And everything was in great condition and nothing damaged. We closed the door, ate dinner, watch some TV, and went to bed with the sound of a fountain behind our Nest.