Lake Anita State Park, IA / T-Bone Recreation Trail (4/23 - 4/27/23)

Not far from our last stop is the small town of Anita, Iowa and the Lake Anita State Park where we stayed. Another lake view campground with full hookups. Nearby, we rode the T-Bone Recreational Trail that is another typical Iowa rail trail.

On the north end of the trail is the town of Audubon that has the World's Largest Bull, the iconic Albert the Bull statue right at the end of the trail.

At Lake Anita State Park, they have a paved trail that circles the lake and provides access to the town for a total of around six miles. From the other side of the lake, you can see our home on wheels (black/grey/blue/white) in the middle of this picture.

The T-Bone Trail isn't a Hall of Fame Rail Trail, but it is a nice 20 mile, paved trail of mixed concrete and asphalt. The trail is in fair to good condition, but it does have the horizontal cracks Iowa trails often suffer on paved asphalt where filling those cracks become an annual necessity.

As with any trail, you come across an occasional challenge. Luckily, we could walk around and it was cleared by the next day.

I guess the restoration of this bridge wasn't worth the effort, so they just re-routed the trail across a much more robust bridge nearby.

Much of the trail is concealed in tree-lined corridors, but most of the trail parallels a busy highway not too far away.

Near where we stayed was the site of the world's first robbery of a moving train by the infamous Jesse James Gang in 1873. This area of Iowa wasn't always known for Iowa nice. In the town of Dexter not too far, a major gunfight with the Bonnie and Clyde gang took place in 1933 where everyone in the gang was injured or dying. And a few years before that in 1922, the more heinous Vilisca Axe Murders that killed eight remains unsolved to this day.

This is a panoramic view of this lake from our view on the bile ride around the lake. Now, we move closer to South Dakota!