This morning we woke up and made our way to the Storm Lake Times to meet Art Cullen. Art Cullen is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his newspaper. We were assigned his book Storm Lake before we arrived in Iowa forever-ago. I read half the book and then downloaded the audiobook to listen to the second half while on the plane. The narrator of the audiobook led me to believe that Art was going to be much different than he was. Art was casual and opinionated. He responded to every question we had with a well worded, well rounded answer that aligned with what many of our class thought as well. Like Jose Ibarra, he was very humble. I got him to sign my graph paper notebook, I think he thought that was crazy. It was cool to meet someone who has brought so much attention to an area that people outside of Iowa probably would not have heard much about otherwise.

The second half of the day was spent testing water in Okoboji with Mary Skopec. We went to two different sites to test the water quality. The first site was on the site of the Lakeside Laboratory, which is reserved landscape, so we didn’t expect to find any issues. The next place we tested was besides a field that had just been planted. Although we were expecting to find issues there, they were minimal. The levels of Phosphorus and Nitrogen were definitely elevated but not enough that they would be regulated as unsafe. Mary Skopec said that at one point all of the rivers in Iowa were clear enough to see the bottom. I thought that was really crazy to think about.

After we were done testing the water, Hannah and I decided it was clean enough to go Kkayaking in. We paddled around Lake Okoboji until it was time for dinner. It was really fun and relaxing. For a while, we followed a group of geese for fun.