Day 63 Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri

In the center of the map is Cairo, Illinois.  We crossed a bridge over the Ohio River, into Illinois.  A mile later we crossed a bridge over the Mississippi River into Missouri.  In Paducah the Tennessee River flows into the Ohio River.  Only 34 miles later the Ohio flows into the Mississippi at Cairo.  

Here we are at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  There was a great park here where we learned about the area.  Lewis and Clark stayed here in Nov. 1803 on their trip west.  This area was also Fort Defiance where the Union army amassed during the Civil War.  Today there is lots of river traffic.  We saw pleasure boats, fishing boats and lots of barges.

Looking back at the first bridge we crossed over the Ohio River.  This tug boat has a raft of barges, 5 barges wide and 5 barges long.  Most of the barges are full of corn and soy beans.  Gary talked with a man whose job was to determine the weight of the product in the loaded barge.  There is a scale marked on the side of the barge.  He would recorded the draft when the barge was empty and the draft of the barge when it was full.  The difference is the weight of the product.  EUREKA says Archimedes.

We spent the day driving in the Ozark Mountains. As you can see, they are tree covered hills.  Nice country.   Here we are driving into a storm.  We parked at the Ozark Mountain Springs RV park near Mountain View, MO. and the park hosts suggested the guys get parked while the women did the registration so as to get hooked up before the rain started.  Well, didn't quite work out.  Rich was still at the registration office so gave Garnet, Candy and I a ride to our rigs.  We all got soaked getting from the truck to the rigs even with the coat Gary brought me.  It was hot so needed to get the AC running.  Once we got inside and somewhat dried off, we watched the lightning, listened to the thunder and watched rain coming down like we had never seen before.  This is the remnant of tropical storm Newton which came in from the Pacific over Baja and Tuscon.  Rooneys 5th wheel sprang a leak in the roof since the last rain and they discovered water running into their unit.  The storm couldn't get over soon enough for them.  When we arrived at Candys sisters the next day she explained that we had experienced what they call here a "Toad Strangler".