I got my tickets to Iowa Speedway last week. The speedway uses TicketMaster to handle their online ordering. What sucks is that my tickets are just generic tickets. No special artwork or designs like you get on the Indy 500 and Chicagoland Speedway tickets. Don’t they know people keep their ticket stubs as mementos?

Anyway, with the flooding in Iowa, I became pretty concerned about what kind of ordeal I’d have to go through to reach the speedway. It’s on I-80 in Newton, so it is quite accessible. However, I-80 was flooded at its crossing of the Cedar River. The pic is courtesy of the Des Moines Register. I found this out while looking at the Iowa Department of Transportation’s traveler info website this weekend to see if I’d have any problems traveling next Sunday. Let me tell you, Iowa DOT’s travel info website is awesome. There are two versions, and the Google Maps “high-bandwidth” version is really cool. You can query different roads for construction and blockage info, and you can mouse over a road segment to see what problems exist there. So if you are ever traveling through Iowa, check out the DOT’s travel website.

I thought I could avoid the flooding by dropping down I-74 and crossing the Mississippi at Burlington, Iowa, then joining I-80 near Iowa City. However, I found a picture of the flooding in Burlington, where a street sign was nearly covered with water. So the I-80 detour of going up to Clinton IA and taking US-20 west was looking more and more like the only option. That was a 2.5hr detour, making my total trip to Iowa Speedway take 7.5 hours. I was planning to reserve a hotel room in Grinnell or Pella this Thursday if 80 was still closed, then head out there on Saturday to spend the night.

However, I found good news in a Quad Cities newspaper saying I-80 was opening today at 4PM. And what do you know, the Iowa DOT’s travel website said the detour was to be followed until 4PM today. I just looked at the website now, and no more closure is shown on I-80 at the Cedar River. Provided there isn’t any more rain between now and Sunday, I should have a fairly straightforward trip to Iowa Speedway. If the speedway puts out donation cans for the flood victims, I might drop in a few bucks since I have the good fortune of enjoying an IndyCar race while they’re pretty much screwed.