Cornfields and farmhouses. It must be Iowa.

I headed for Fort Dodge this morning. For the entire 81-mile ride today, I saw cornfields and farmhouses and I went through exactly four towns: Meservey (population 230), Eagle Grove (population 3,515), Badger (population 586), and Fort Dodge (population 25,493). This is a dramatic change from just a couple weeks ago when I was riding through the Chicago area and towns were frequent and fairly large.

Early in the ride today, I passed the Cerro Gordo Wind Farm. There were so many turbines in this wind farm that it took a good 30 minutes to pass by the entire farm. According to the Cerro Gordo Wind Farm observation area, the farm spans 2,110 acres and has a generating capacity of 42 megawatts. There are a total of 55 turbines and the total footprint of all those turbines is only 2.4 acres. Because of the small footprint and 10 miles of underground cables to transmit electricity, there is a minimal effect on farming. At the observation area, they had a chart of power generation versus wind speed. Power generation went up and up until the wind speed reached about 35 miles per hour. At that point, power generation was about the same to the right end of the chart (about 55 miles per hour). I was looking at this chart and getting ill with the thought that I might experience winds like that in this area. Suddenly, I was thankful for today’s west winds of only 10 miles per hour.

The campground we stayed at last night was right next to Clear Lake (the lake AND the city). We walked down to the beach and I took a couple pictures of the sunset. I had already put away the computer so I wasn’t able to upload these pictures for yesterday’s entry. I thought you might enjoy a couple sunset photos, so I uploaded them today.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 7:21 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour, Bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.