2024 Kentucky Trip
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We’re off to see Aunt Carole and Uncle Larry
With final packing and cleaning and chasing down the cats, we were ready to leave on our Kentucky trip at about noon. It was a beautiful, sunny day as we drove to Bucklin, Missouri to moochdock at the “old-fashioned farm house” (Aunt Carole’s description) at the edge of town. My cousins grew up thinking they…
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Bennett Springs State Park, MO
We stopped at the Truman Lake Dam and Harry S Truman Visitor Center at lunchtime. This US Army Corps of Engineers dam provides hydroelectric power and flood control. The view from the visitor center is fantastic! We’ll put this area on our future camping list. We also walked on short trails to see the Hooper…
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A tunnel, a turtle and numerous ticks
A natural tunnel sounded like a perfect destination hike for the day. This 7.5 mile—advertised; 8.25 mile—reality hike lived up to its promise of seeing varied habitats and wildlife, an old cemetery, and a 300 foot natural, S-shaped tunnel, reinforced with some aggregate and rebar. Our entire hike was accompanied by the sounds of cicadas,…
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>100 Million Gallons/Day
That’s a lot of cold, clear water gushing from Bennett Spring each day to feed the stream branch where the trout are released. We found the “whorl pool” where the water comes up and hiked around the stream, watching anglers in action. The dining lodge will cook your fish for you after you clean it.…
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Johnson Shut-Ins State Park, MO
My first question upon learning about this state park was, “What’s a shut-in?” I had images of people with frail health in group homes. In a nutshell—this river is “shut-in” by hard, ancient volcanic rock (rhyolite) that does not erode away like sedimentary rock. This section of the Black River cannot “wander” out of its…
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Johnson or Johnston?
The family that farmed this rocky area that most settlers avoided was named Johnston, like the town in Iowa where I taught middle school and high school. The census records dropped the “t” assuming it was silent, and when the state park was formed, the chosen spelling also dropped the “t”. In Johnston, Iowa, the…
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Giant City State Park, IL
Thursday night we walked a four-mile round trip to the visitors center in Giant City State Park. We didn’t have cell service and there was no scale on the paper map of the park. It is very spread out, and partially includes a county road with higher speeds than is truly safe to walk along.…
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Most beautiful backyard garden
As we left the Giant City State Park in the rain, we decided to drive to the nearby village of Makanda hoping for some cell service to load maps. What a fortunate turn that was. We came across the Makanda Boardwalk, which is a set of eclectic shops in old buildings. We made a couple…
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Ferne Clyffe State Park Waterfalls
Two brothers, with a family name of Cairo (which probably started the Egypt-themed names in this part of Illinois), purchased part of this park and gave it the name because of the abundance of ferns. Apparently, they weren’t great at spelling, but they knew beautiful property when they saw it. Emma Rebman, a local school…
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Addendum to Blue Heron Vineyards
Tony read my post and said I didn’t even talk about the wine, and he’s correct that I neglected to do that. We bought a bottle of their Hoosier Red which is made from the Chambourcin grapes they grow. The bottle says this is the signature wine of the Hoosier Wine Trail. It was a…