Detroit area and on to the Upper Mississippi River

(posted from the Wal-Mart parking lot in La Crosse, WI)

(this post covers 30 July to 5 August)

Saturday, August 5--
Temperatures have moderated to the high-80’s in the daytime (but with lower humidity than earlier in the week) and lows are in the high sixties. Until last night, the challenge has been to cool the van down enough to sleep once we stop for the night. The comfort point seems to be 80 degrees on the inside thermometer and it’s common for the thermometer in the sleeping area of the van to read 105-110 during the day of late. Once we park the van for the night, I’ve been opening up the doors and the hood (to let engine heat escape) and I hang our portable Fantastic Fan between the seats to push hot air out the open back doors. So far that has worked OK but mostly because I’ve been able to find shade in the campground. We’ve had to avoid Wal-Mart parking lots because of the lack of shade and the intense heat coming off the asphalt.
Our campground for last night is in Pike’s Peak State Park on the western bank of the Mississippi. This area has native American ‘effigy mounds’ and in fact the Effigy Mounds National Monument is only a few miles north. Effigy Mounds are earthen burial and ceremonial mounds built by the Indians starting as early as 1000 B.C. and continuing until 1300 A.D. If I understood correctly, the earlier mounds were circular or linear mounds of earth several feet high and often contained a body and perhaps that individual’s daily implements of living or sometimes just the implements. Later, the Indians began making the mounds in shapes, most often in bear and bird shapes.
This morning we walked at Pikes Peak and saw one burial mound plus a pretty little waterfall you could walk behind (Bridal Veil Falls) and overlooks of the junction of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers.
We then drove to Effigy Mounds National Monument and toured the visitor’s center to learn about them. All the mounds here are accessible only by trail and we decided to go see the Marching Bears mounds. These more remote mounds are about two miles from the road and require a steep walk up the several-hundred-feet-high bluff. We were pleasantly surprised by the great trail; it was a nice forest road covered entirely with wood chips. The walk in was a steady uphill and took an hour. We were in no rush, though, and took our time, enjoying two indigo buntings we saw flitting around the bushes and trying a few scrumptious blackberries. The mounds were on a hilltop overlooking the Mississippi and were arranged across an opening about two football fields in length and one in width. Though this area is called the Marching Bear mounds, they are the same standing-bear shape as elsewhere; there are just ten of them more or less in a row plus three bird mounds and two linear mounds.
The mounds are intriguing but also a little frustrating in that nobody really knows how they were used. Obviously there was quite an effort made to build the mounds in the first place. But what then? How often were they visited? Were the visits part of a general rendez-vous or did small groups or even individuals visit them? They are on a hilltop and under a canopy of trees now but even so local people interested in them have from time to time outlined them with lime and taken photos from the air. Did the Indians outline them in some way so they’d be visible from the ridge across the river? Very interesting, these mounds.
After our visit to the Marching Bear string of mounds we headed back and along the way took a side trail just to see where it went. Along that trail we saw more mounds, all round or linear in shape. That added up to a five mile walk for us and we were glad to see the van when we got back down to the river.
We had an in-van snack of apples and peanut butter then crossed the Mississippi into Wisconsin and into the historic town of Prairie du Chien. While today it’s pretty much just a small Wisconsin town of 6000 souls, the area was first visited in 1673 by Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliette as part of their discovery of the upper Mississippi. The town itself was founded by voyageurs and was a fur-trading and trader rendez-vous center.
We continued driving up the right bank of the Mississippi on SR 35 past hundreds of thousands of acres of the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife Refuge. I imagine that’s quite a sight during the fall bird migrations.
We made it to La Crosse, WI where we are spending the night at the Wal-Mart and, as luck would have it, we even had a good wi-fi connection in the parking lot so I was able to check our email and do this blog update, my first of this trip.

Friday, 4 August-
We drove into Dubuque today and went to the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium. We had intended to only be there for the two hours recommended by the guidebook but we must be slow tourists--- we spent five hours there. We enjoyed the giant maps of the river; hydrologic models demonstrating river formation and the effects of different flood levels on Dubuque; steamboat, riverboat and keelboat displays; touring a Corps of Engineers Mississippi side-wheel dredger; seeing a bull-boat; seeing a good Lewis-and-Clark section; seeing catfish of the world; and seeing a good barge-tow simulation program in action. A new fact we learned? Some steamboats had ‘grasshopper beams’, which are wooden beams it can deploy off the front of the boat to help lift the front of the boat up in order to cross shallows. Another fact? The typical 300-acre family farm in this area produces about 1500 tons of grain. That’s one barge-full. Mississippi barge tows typically run 15 barges in this section of the river and up to 45 barges in the lower Mississippi. The barges run 24 x 7 and their crews work a six-hours-on/six-hours-off schedule for 30 days straight then get 15 days off, then do it all over again.
After our day in the museum, we drove on to Guttenberg, where we sampled the local ice cream (“Just like your mother used to make!”), then on to Pike’s Peak State Park just south of McGregor, IA. The campground was crowded this Friday night but the site was only $11.

Thursday, 3 August-
After sleeping in a bit, we had breakfast and a shower and started driving in cloudy and misty weather. We toured the Mississippi Palisades park overlooks, first stopping at Oscar’s Overlook. While we stood at the overlook, the sky cleared—almost on cue. It turned out to be a wonderful day, with low humidity and a high temp of 80. (At the next overlook I saw a North Carolina car with a bumper sticker I liked: “I’m NOT a Hillbilly, I’m an Appalachian-American”.)
As we checked the map for the next segment of the scenic drive up the river, we noticed the town of Anamosa, Iowa only an hour west. We had picked up a brochure about touring the towns along the river and had seen that Anamosa is the home of the National Motorcycle Museum. And more good news—there’s scenic road all the way to Anamosa and most of the way from there back to the Mississippi. That made it an easy decision to go.
The drive to Anamosa was an eye-opener. Iowa is beautiful! We enjoyed mile after mile of gently rolling hills through cornfields, soybean fields, neat little farms, and tiny little don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns. And the motorcycle museum was great. They have two hundred bikes, almost every one of them interesting. From the turn-of-the-century motorized bicycles and British classics to Japanese ling-lings to the original Easy Rider Captain-America bike—very cool!
Late in the afternoon we drove from Anamosa across the Mississippi to Galena, Illinois to see some classic architecture. We only did it as a drive-through, however, given that it was late in the day. On the way out of town was another Culver’s restaurant so we sampled another Butterburger—just to be sure the one in Dixon wasn’t a fluke.
We decided to stay back across the river again near Dubuque, Iowa so we could visit a museum there the next day. As we crossed the river we could see a city-run campground nearby and gave it a try. It happened to sit beside the Dubuque Greyhound Races and Casino so we walked over and watched a few greyhound races—a first for Labashi—and walked the bicycle trail around the park area. The campground was Miller’s Riverview and our site there was $12 for the night. It was OK; there was quite a lot of railroad and boating noise but things settled down nicely after midnight. And we had some more late-night visitors. A couple of guys in an old car showed up near us around 0430 to scavenge the trash cans for beer bottles and aluminum cans. Why it makes sense to do that at 0430 escapes me (and I didn’t ask!)

Wednesday, 2 August-
After a few hours more of visiting with Labashi’s sister, we got underway for points west. The route plan is a generic one--- head for Chicago, then turn northwest toward Minneapolis-St. Paul, then toward Fargo, ND, then Regina, SK. As we were deciding how to get to Minneapolis, I noticed that we could go due west from Chicago on I-88 toward Quad Cities and could cut up to Savannah, Illinois and the start of the scenic (dotted-line) road running up the Mississippi, then break off toward Minneapolis. Sounds good.
We ran into a traffic slowdown on I-80/I-94 below Chicago but were out of it within an hour and once we made the turn onto I-88 traffic was back up to it’s regular 65+ pace. By Dixon, we were hungry and stopped at a Culver’s fast-food restaurant (“Home of the Butterburger!”). We lucked out—butterburgers are great!—very much like the original Wendy’s burgers; meaty and juicy. About a half-hour before dark we arrived at Mississippi Palisades State Park above Savannah. We were pleasantly surprised at the $10 rate in this nice campground and found it nearly empty— perhaps not a big surprise given the day’s high temperature of 95. An interesting thing happened there and I’m still not sure what to make of it. As I was sitting outside with a cold Gatorade trying to cool off before bed-time I heard what sounded like a mid-size dog growling in the nearby woods. I didn’t pay much attention to it. But later, after dark, the growling started again. It seemed to come from the same place and would only last for a minute or two of low, intense growling; then it would stop. That happened five or six times and was pretty close. I decided I’d better close the van doors since we only had screening covering them. There didn’t seem to be any immediate threat to us but then again I wasn’t comfortable going to sleep with that noise so close by out there either. Sometime later I distinctly heard something brush up against the lower part of the back door of the van, then a few seconds later a similar sound low along the left side of the van. In retrospect, I think those two things were unrelated—the brushing sound was either a raccoon on patrol or perhaps even a dream. Labashi slept through it, after all, and she tends to be a very light sleeper. In the early morning hours, the heat lightning we had been seeing last evening turned into a thunderstorm. So between the dog/fox/coyote/boogeyman and the thunderstorm, I didn’t fall off to sleep again until daylight and then slept heavily.

Tuesday, 1 August-
After another Starbuck’s walk-and-read, I worked with Dad on resolving some problems with their DVR system. Then we drove an hour west to visit Labashi’s sister and family. We spent a pleasant afternoon and evening visiting. Labashi cleaned up on Monopoly and we laughed our way through a game of ‘The Worst Possible Scenario’. Temperatures were still high and very slow to cool off so we gladly accepted an offer to sleep on a mattress in the rec-room.

Monday, 31 July-
I took an early-morning walk to a nearby Starbucks for a coffee and to read the very good Detroit newspapers then hiked back to the house in steam-bath humidity—and it was only nine o’clock in the morning! While Labashi plied her Mom and Dad for family history information, I worked on Mom’s computer, hoping to resolve a problem with it running so excruciatingly slowly as to be unusable. I downloaded utilities to clean off junk files and run a virus check and found and quarantined a virus and then ran a disk de-frag and response times improved to the point its usable again. By afternoon, we had record-tying high temps outside (96) so I was very content to just keep puttering around on the computer. That evening we had another of Mom’s great meals, this one of meatballs and pasta.

Sunday, 30 July-
We finally got underway on our Saskatchewan trip today. Our goal for the day was to drive the 500 miles to the Detroit suburbs to visit Labashi’s parents for a day before moving on. The drive was pleasantly uneventful though hot (95 degrees and no a/c). We were on the road for nine hours so it felt great to get there, cool off, then enjoy a great shrimp dinner and conversation with her Mom and Dad.