Little Giant City State Park, Carbondale, Il
Today was all about the journey not the destination. We crossed into Kentucky, all 60 miles of her. The GRR is actually quite beautiful on this section. We enjoyed stopping at the one block towns, getting various views of the Mississippi River and popping into GRR "visit centers" often staffed by one person who was always so delighted that somebody came by. There was lots of fertile farmland and barely a two lane road in many sections. Which brings up the highlight of the morning. As we were traveling on this country road a police car, from the opposite direction, flagged us down and said there was a large piece of oversize farm equipment coming. In fact, it was so large that we couldn't both be on the road at the same time. Problem was, we were driving on a levy so there really wasn't any place for us to turn off. The officer said we had a good 3 minutes before "it" came. Turns out a farmer pulling his corn planter with a tractor was trying to be nice and let a car pass. When pulling over the corn planter flipped and broke an axle. A tow truck had to pull the corn planter backwards with the tractor driving in reverse at a maximum speed of 3 mph. This rated a police escort (or technically sheriff escort) in front and back. The first dirt road we pulled into had another tractor coming our way. Ned and I struck up a conversation with the farmer from Kentucky, who turned out to be a really nice guy. He was telling us all about the accident, the rains that have caused havoc with their planting schedule and the flood of 2011 compared to the flood of 1936. You can sure learn a lot when you have the time and are just hanging out on a dirt road in Kentucky. I snapped a picture of farmer Ned (Iowa boy) having a conversation with farmer Hank (Kentucky boy). Cute.
We were in search of Fort Defiance, near Cairo, IL. This place is not only where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet, but was also the place where General Grant planned his strategy in attacking Vicksburg. We were expecting a visitor's center, large fort, monument, heck even a road marker. Nada. We crossed into Missouri (2nd time over the Mighty Miss), scratched our heads and finally located a gravel road leading to the point of the peninsula. Fort Defiance consists of a concrete platform and a couple a flights of stairs for a lookout. We inquired about this later at the nearby former Toll Station now a pubescent visit center (had great intentions, but no info yet), and was told that with the way the Mississippi ebbs and flows there's no way a structure would hold at Fort Defiance. We did see an abandoned RV park there with the electrical boxes about 6 ft in the air! It was really amazing to see these two powerful and significant rivers joining forces. A barge was located just a few feet from us and it's impressive how big these are, how fast the rivers flow and the amount of debris floating down - such as entire logs and trees, roots and all. Watching the tug boats push barges upstream loaded down with Kentucky coal was also pretty cool.
We meandered into Cape Girardeau, a sleepy college town on the Missouri side of the river, did a little exploring, and were planning on staying at the Trail of Tears State Park to learn more about the Cherokee forced migration. We called the campground to see how they were doing with the high river levels. Oh, they were open but the road getting there was flooded. Mmmm - plan B. We looked at campgrounds on both sides of Ol' Miss and finally headed for high ground in Illinois. And to my amazement, we found a campground pretty high up for Illinois! We are situated at a huge, sleepy, dated, campground complex. It has a lodge built in the 1930's by the WPA, horse trails, lakes, campgrounds, all spread out over several miles. The campground holds close to 80 sites, but there are only a handful of us here. We're enjoying hanging out, planning our day tomorrow and as luck would have it making use of our new awning. A 15 minute shower from no where surprised us! Hoping for a good night's sleep since we have quite an eventful day planned tomorrow regarding the Corp of Engineers efforts to tame the Mighty Miss. Ned heard there's a simulator for navigating a barge into a lock and he can't wait.
