The Homefront Lines: Abbe Creek

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Abbe Creek

We left the campground on Friday to do some site seeing. We camp at the same campground every Fourth of July in the same site. And each year we see signs for interesting things. Each year we say, "We should go check that out." Each year we don't. This year I told Cool, "We are doing this, this, this and this. Just so ya know." Cool, being the loving, wonderful husband that he is said, "OK. Anything you want my love, my friend, my queen." OK, maybe he didn't say those exact words, but we did go site seeing none-the-less. Our first stop was Abbe Creek School.

Unfortunately, the school wasn't open for tourists on the day we went. But we still got to take in the beauty of the old country school. Built in 1856, it is the oldest brick school building still standing in the state of Iowa or so I read.

The history carved on the outside of the building was neat. 1925 was the oldest date I saw. I wonder who DMA is. Would I have been friends with them?

I love puppy love. I hope they are happily married now.

Abbe Creek School is next to Abbe Creek, DUH! But in these parts we don't call them "creeks" we call them "cricks". But Abbe Crick doesn't sound as good as Abbe Creek so for arguments sake, I will keep referring to it as a creek unless I decide crick sounds better.

This has two set of steps. One set on this side of the fence and one set on the other side of the fence.

So as we walked up the one set and down the other we found ourselves walking along the crick. It was very peaceful and had quite a current. I am not sure if cricks have currents but this one did. Abbe Creek was the water source for the school back in the day.

We realized the fence was to keep the cows on the other side off the school lawn. The cows were cooling themselves in the crick. It was quite clear that we were disturbing them. In this instance and the one above, crick is the proper way to describe the body of water, just for the record.

This mama is glaring at Chip who is way too close to her youngun. The calf is running to it's mama cause Chip is scary, really he is.

You will need to picture the following scenario because I don't have a picture to show it....cause I was running ya see. Chip, the blue speck, in the above picture was the cause of the ruckus in the scenario you are going to have imagine. That mama cow was not too happy about him being so close to her babe, ya see. So, she stared him down until felt his life was in peril and decided to leave. Well, after turning to leave, Chip decided to run.

What Chip didn't know is that by starting to run he could spook the cows. Cattle can spook easily. So by running, Chip spooked this field full of over protective mamas and caused a, um, er, a stampede of sorts. See those cows in back of Chip? They started to run after him which in essence caused us to start to run because, well, we didn't want to be cow fodder.

I'm guessing they just wanted to play. Maybe a game of cat and mouse or bovine and human? Who said the smart cows live in California? These here are Iowa cows and they are pretty darned smart. They got a family of 5 to run for their lives.

Regardless of the fact that we were chased by Bessie and her friends and that the school wasn't open, we had a great time exploring the crick and the grounds of Abbe Creek School.