Looking back at the months of May and June, it is hard to remember now, during a drought, how I yearned for a weekend without rain, but this trip to Council Bluffs/Omaha is a great reminder.  Originally I planned on celebrating our wedding anniversary (29 years) by camping at Lake Manawa State Park.  With sporadic rains in the forecast, I booked a room at the Hilton Garden Inn which is attached to the Horseshoe Casino so we’d have something to do during the rains.

We lucked out on our room because we got a free room upgrade to a suite with a whirlpool tub!  It does pay to be a Hilton Honors member!  Even thought I drove in rain to get to Council Bluffs, I totally expected it to clear off, especially since we had two days to pick from for our visit to the Omaha Zoo.  I planned on visiting the Omaha Old Market area one evening too, which I had yet to get to explore, but that did not happen due to constant rain.  We played some slots, checked out the poker room, and ate at the buffet in the casino that first night.  I will say I was very impressed with the casino buffet!  It definitely was one of the better ones!

I just had to have hubby take this picture at the zoo of me standing in the rain because this totally sums up our entire zoo experience.  After staring at the rain coming down for an entire day and evening, I finally said, “Screw it, we are going to the zoo in the rain!” on our final day there, so off we went.  It really never stopped raining the entire day.  I do love this zoo and had not been there for 10 years so we managed to enjoy ourselves in spite of the rain.

Of course, on the day we checked out, the skies cleared.  So I told Hubby we were going to at least drive around Lake Manawa on our way home so we could see if we’d like to come back.  Once we got there, of course I decided I had to at least go a short distance on the bike trail to get the flavor of the trail while hubby stayed there at the lake to try his hand at fishing.  Yes, optimist that I am, I had packed fishing poles along with the bikes.

This train was fun to watch as they slowly were loading it with coal maybe or at least getting the cars linked together and getting it ready to leave, I assume.  There was a lot of clanging going on anyway!  The trail was very isolated and eventually would have linked up to the Wabash Trace bike trail that goes 60- some miles south towards Missouri.  However, I knew I needed to turn around before that!  Once out of the park itself, the trail had an industrial feel to it, but I will leave you with the picture below of a nice portion of nature.  On a side note, when I got back to the car, hubby was sound asleep in the car so unfortunately the fishing was not very good probably because of all the rain.

If you would like to read about a Council Bluffs visit I had last year with no rain, click here.