OnJeffsBike: Part II: Summer Adventure 2019: Water, water, everywhere

Part II, June 18-19

Tuesday, June 18: Paducah to St. Charles

On Vacation Day 5 we should have been hot on the trail of Lewis & Clark, with stops at the confluences of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers AND the Missouri and Ohio. Instead, we spent the day on detours and work-arounds for flooding of near historic levels. No one disaster caused this — just heavy snow pack and intense spring rains that saturated the soil.

Our first stop was at Port Jefferson on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and marked by a very tall cross. We didn't realize it yet, but we were lucky that this point on our itinerary was so high!

In contrast, we didn't make it to our next confluence marker. It was underwater. Even this marker should have been farther from the Ohio River than it was during our visit.

Onward to Cairo Illinois for a photo of a memorial to Seaman. Who is Seaman, you ask? Merriweather Lewis's dog and intrepid explorer. We saw a lot of him on this trip! Aside from Seaman, the town of Cairo offered little. It was dead quiet, almost no traffic, and showed the signs of a place that had seen better days.

The main drag in Cairo, mid-day.

Back on the road, I amused myself with photos of the unexpected.

Optimism epitomized.

Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois Senate race. Although Lincoln lost the election to Douglas, the debates gave him national prominence. There were a series of seven debates in different locations around the state. (Since Lincoln's Twitter feed wasn't active, people actually had to attend or read a newspaper to know what what said!). We visited sites commemorating two of the debates. The third debate, but the first site we visited, was in Jonesboro IL. The commemorative site is in a picnic grove that is part of the Shawnee National Forest.

The next stop was on a road to nowhere. But one of the bonuses of hanging out with someone with a lot of LD rally experience is that he knows what's at the end of those roads. This is one of those memorials that would be so easy to overlook and such a pity to miss.

And then this!

The first of two Buckminster Fuller-designed residences on this trip! See the plaque below.

Chester Illinois is the "birthplace" of Popeye! And they milk it to the hilt. But it was fun. I had forgotten about how Wimpy always crossed his fingers while promising to pay on Tuesday.

And Chester was expecting us!

Chester's other claim to fame is the Chester Bridge. One of the signs informed us that the current bridge was built after others had been lost in floods; and, since the current bridge was opened in 1946, it has closed for flooding only once, in 1993. Whoops! Time to update that sign! It was closed the day we there because the far end wasn't leading to dry ground.

The Chester bridge was supposed to take us to Cape Girardeau, but with all the other bridge outages and road closures, Cape Girardeau was off the table. Instead we had to make our way up the Illinois side of the river to reach St. Louis.

The power of the rivers was evident everywhere!

St. Louis, near the Arch.

We passed through many small towns and I somewhat randomly shot pictures, although the roosters were a particular attraction given Jeff's long-standing affinity for big chicken statues.

What's the message here? Eat! Got it. Eat chicken? Not sure. They're kinda cute.

Here another oblique message. A chicken in a top hat certainly provokes thought, but I'm not sure the thoughts are about food.

And there's a classic! Not a "DQ." It's the real thing.

Another NPS site visit took us to the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. This land was in his wife's family and he proved not to be either a great farmer or business man. By time he died (in a cottage near Wilton NY), he was little more than a pauper working desperately to finish his memoirs (which he did) so that he could leave the proceeds to his wife, Julia Dent Grant. But this farm was in lovely setting.

The Arch! And immigrants! We made it to St. Louis!

With the flooding, we did not get to the base of the arch as expected. But we did stop at the visitor's center, a few blocks away from the river in a lovely old building. St. Louis also included a stop to pay our respects at the grave of William Clark. I was a bit confused by the grave marker for General Meriwether Lewis Clark (who?), until I read that he was William Clark's oldest son.

Next was the Lewis & Clark State Historic Site in Hartford, Illinois. We found a marker commemorating the L&C encampment on the River DuBois, near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, where the expedition spent the winter of 1803-04 preparing for their departure. The State Historic Site includes a museum, which was unfortunately closed on the day of our visit. But we hoped to at least be able to walk around the grounds of the park. As luck would have it, we arrived just as a trustee meeting was breaking up and the trustees were being let out of the closed visitor center/museum by the director. We ended up engaging the director in conversation about our trip and he invited us into the museum so we could get the "passport" stamp and take a quick look around. Our private tour was very brief, but the boat exhibit was really impressive. Alas, however, our plans to walk around were foiled. The marker near the river and the observation tower were off limits due to the flooding. The director said we could take the path up to the embankment, but it wasn't safe to go further. We had already seen the barricades on our way in, so we decided it wasn't the day for a hike. \

Provisioning for this expedition was extensive!

It's Seaman again! The lighting is poor because only the emergency lights were on in the museum during our private tour.

The last Lincoln-Douglas debate was held in Alton, Illinois. Again, the river commanded as much attention as the tourist sights!

Alton, Illinois' memorial to Lincoln and Douglas' closing debate, Oct. 15, 1958.

Alton is usually on the banks of the Mississippi, below the juncture with the Illinois River and just upstream from where the Missouri River flows into the Mississippi. But during our visit, parts of Alton were IN the river.

We crossed back into Missouri again over the flooded Mississippi.

We thought one of the roads we were on seemed a bit odd. Then we realized that the two lane road was one half of a four lane road that had been converted to two-way. The other lane was under the water.

Even though this riverbank gauge showed the river short of 1993 levels, parks and other places we had planned to visit were off-limits.

We stayed the night outside of Saint Charles -- which has an absolutely charming historic district. (I didn't get a good picture of the Conestoga Wagon they had on display along the road.) Another place on the list of places to visit again, and stay for longer.

Behind the "closed" barrier, so this is as close as we got.

St. Charles

Our Super 8 motel on the outskirts of St. Charles had a restaurant, Culpeppers, in the parking lot, which made the decision about where to eat dinner really easy!

Wednesday, June 19: St. Charles to Branson

After a quick stop at a firefighters memorial at a bleak spot on an interchange for a Tour of Honor photo, we visited the grounds of the Winston Churchill Museum in the town of Fulton MO on the campus of Westminster College. The museum was not yet open, but I loved the “Breakthrough” sculpture. Of the many places chunks of the Berlin Wall have landed, this is not only an appropriate placement, but the most evocative use I’ve seen.

Jefferson City MO was on the route for its Liberty Bell, Lewis & Clark memorial, and a couple of geocaches. The construction work at the Capitol, where all these features were located, was evident from afar. But luckily, we managed to find them all.

Ride 'em, Cowbear!

A Miss Liberty, courtesy of the Boy Scouts of America. A bonus for a Team Strange Grand Tour past.

A memorial - perhaps ToH?

Declaration signing. There was a Ten Commandments sculpture nearby too. This plaza had one of everything.

One of the nicer L&C statues. The water feature helps.

Part of the fake crack faction.

Back on the road, I managed to capture a picture of this interesting sky.

A geocache brought us to this "stonehenge." Unlike the one in England, this smaller version was all very carefully marked to show exactly how it related to the astronomical movements it reflects, which made it MUCH more interesting.

A mini-Stonehenge at the University of Missouri -- Rolla

The weather got wetter for awhile, although the blue skies promised hope.

Later in the day, the blue skies came back in force.

I think it was in Waynesville when we picked up Historic Route 66 for a short ways. We passed through small towns and then we reached what was for me the highlight of the day.

As as child, I was obsessed for quite a few years by Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books. The TV show came along when I was older and I was never a fan of it because it so trivialized her books. But the books were treasures!

Laura's sister Mary was blinded by illness as a child and so Laura "became her eyes" and developed an extraordinary devotion to detail. Her books provided insights into pioneer life that my school's history books never touched. Whether it was plowing a firebreak in the face of an on-coming prairie fire, rolling straw "logs" for the stove during the winter her family nearly froze and starved, detailing how the grades were built for the first train railbeds, or describing how they conserved paper by writing answers to letters perpendicularly to the lines first written to them, she delivered an unparalleled look at day to day life that has always enthralled me. When I re-read the books aloud to my children, my admiration only grew.

Jeff stopped so I could make a brief visit to her Ozark Mountain home (her home as an adult) and museum. Fabulous!!! The museum had Pa’s fiddle, the calling cards she and Almanzo exchanged, her first sampler, letters, and many other artifacts. I was so enthralled I forgot to take pictures! Unfortunately, I did not have time for the house tour. Jeff patiently waited in the parking lot plotting out the rest of a still busy day to come, while I speed-viewed the museum and walked around the exterior of her house.

The Ingalls home

The Carl Mays signboard (a bonus from a rally past) and a bust were in the town park and we also stopped at her gravesite on our way out of town.

Springfield's boast is Route 66!

The Route 66 museum had a number of relics, one of which, at least, would have served us well on the 2019 Rock n Ride Rally.

A jukebox that plays records is hard to find these days!

Remember the tangled cords? Extra long so you could walk around.

There were many Route 66 tributes around town, but too much to include here.

We visited more war memorials, some of which were more interesting (or at least arresting) than others. We also stopped at Wilson's Creek National Battlefield.

We did not stop at the Creation Experience Museum but we did marvel at its very large cross. The stone cuts along the road were also attention-grabbing.

We reached Branson, our destination for the night well before dusk. But, we weren't done yet!

Our first Branson stop was -- wait for it -- a war memorial for Tour of Honor. Not exactly what Branson is known for, but like everything else there, it was over the top as memorials go. They had lots of stuff outside plus an inside we did not visit.