Rather than drive quickly out of the Midwest and concentrate on everything west of the Missouri River, as I was thinking of doing, Lindsay quickly started planning a sightseeing tour right out of southern Indiana by steering us off the Interstate highways. I had no idea she would be interested in seeing the agricultural and architectural side of the Midwest. I’m glad she did because I saw some things I’d never seen before along the Mississippi Great River Road.
We enjoyed watching the farmers of Indiana and Illinois harvesting their soybeans and corn.
The amount of railways and working trains were impressive.
We wanted to say “thanks” to my brother, Brent, for the Midwest style chili which was made from his garden vegetables that he canned into his “chili starter” mix. Fantastic stuff.
We camped our first night for free on the Mississippi River at the Bear Creek campground in Ursa, IL.
We only saw one fishing boat on the river.
We were the only people in the campground, and all we heard was a combine harvesting corn in the distance.
The next morning we took a quick walk along the river. What you see on the left is actually an island to the West of Illinois, not Iowa like I thought at first.
We crossed over into Iowa and drove slowly along the Mississippi River along the Great River Road.
I never would have thought to photograph and old brick building like this, but Lindsay kept saying “Wow”, while pointing, and I encouraged her to take a quick shot of this one.
What can I say. This is a beautiful shot from the side window from Iowa looking at Illinois. Notice the RV shadow in the lower right?
We had to take a detour along gravel roads to find the path along the river again, which was not routed for us with signage, surprisingly, but we managed. We refused to take gravel roads EVER again after that.
We made it all the way to Debuque, Iowa and found a small campground on an island next to this bridge.
We are absolutely loving the RV experience and we took a quick bike ride around the island.
This time of year, since school is in session, we have lots of space between campers.
We were disappointed, however, with the seemingly endless wailing of train horns during the night. We didn’t sleep very well here but the view was spectacular.
Our next destination was to stay with and visit our friends we know from Puerto Morelos, Mexico who live in northern Iowa. Due to their social schedule it was best that we delay our arrival by one day, so we decided to take advantage of a nearby attraction. The Elroy-Sparta National Trail was just a bit north of our route, so we headed up there to get some exercise and enjoy a long ride on a well-developed path. See loads of gorgeous pictures on our next post!