PHP Extracting CDATA from XML

So I am working with an XML data that I am getting from a site. The XML contains CDATA and my script is not picking it up.

XML

<data>
<weather>
<date>2015-01-24</date>
.
.
.
<weatherCode>116</weatherCode>
<weatherIconUrl>
<![CDATA[
http://ift.tt/1ghyyqr
]]>
</weatherIconUrl>
.
.
.
</weather>
</data>

I searched the Internets and stackoverflow. I tried the following:

1.

$xml = simplexml_load_file($strURL, 'SimpleXMLElement', LIBXML_NOCDATA);

2.

$strImage = (string)$node->weatherIconUrl; 

3.

$strImage = var_dump((string)$node->weatherIconUrl);

4.

mb_convert_case(str_replace('        ', '', trim(html_entity_decode(strip_tags($item->description)))), MB_CASE_UPPER, "UTF-8");

Nothing really seems to be working. I put part of my code up. I am using a shared server that has PHP 5.2.

PHP CODE:

<?php
    $strURL = "http://ift.tt/1uKjM5k";

    $xml = simplexml_load_file($strURL, 'SimpleXMLElement', LIBXML_NOCDATA);
    $query = "//data/weather";
    $weather_nodes = $xml->xpath($query);


    foreach($weather_nodes as $node) {

        $strImage = $node->weatherIconUrl; 
        echo "Image: " . $strImage . "</br>";

    }

?>