May 9, 2007 – Travel thru Illinois Part 2

We continued our travels thru the back roads of Illinois
Sites today:
- Many farms with very few trees (except near farm borders and houses).




- Many power lines also dot the landscape. For those from my area, the towers are like those on top of the Burma Road. Since it is so flat here, it looks like they go on forever. Same with the cell phone service – no problems here.

- Near the rivers, more trees and greenery:


Interesting Town Names:
Normal (Do all the normal people live there or just those who want to be normal?)
Cisco (Kid??)
Assumption (Religious or just assuming???)
Mode (What mode are you in today? Oops maybe that should be mood?)
St. Elmo (Fire?)
Luka (from ER?)
Xenia (Warrior Princess!)
Flora (What a beautiful place!)

Interesting Farm Name:
Hayengas Cant Find Farms (I kid you not!)

Now I know I should not make fun since PA has Intercourse, Bird-in-Hand, etc. (No comments, please!). But it is a way to entertain ourselves!!

Today, we crossed the Mississippi and are officially in the West. Every time I see this great river, I wonder what our ancestors thought when they first saw it and had to cross. And every time I have seen the Mississippi, I dreamed of just sitting by the river doing nothing and today I had my dream come true. We were able to camp about 50 feet from the river at an Army Corp of Engineers Campground – Ferry Landing. It was down a long (5 miles) gravel road.







This is what we saw as we approached the campground. So I had to get out of the MH just to check and make sure we were not going into the river. :-)


We were able to watch the barges going down the river (another amazement to me!)

More pictures of the campground (we shared it with one other person) and the river.

Here is a picture of the levee. The neighbor, Mike, that lives just the other side of the levee stopped by to chat. He told us that the area where we are camping gets flooded every year. This year it was under water for about a week in April.

The only tough part was that there was no water and we were low. So even though it was beautiful, we could not stay more than one night. (Can you believe it was free camping???)


Miles Traveled: 285 miles

Routes Traveled:
Illinois:
US 51, US 136, US 67, US 34
Iowa:
US 34, CR 99 (Scenic Byway)