June 30, 2013
Stayed near the southern border of Missouri last night. Today we will, hopefully, travel from Missouri through Arkansas, Kentucky, and end up in Tennassee before we call it a day.
The kids found from quartz rocks in our campsite. Sparky isn’t too happy about adding any weight to Flyer, but I convince him just a few can’t hurt. We’ll take a sledge hammer to these at home and see what’s inside.
We headed south towards Arkansas.
The Northeast area of Arkansas is mostly flat, but with some hills. Lots of green grass and trees.
I guess they prefer drive up mail boxes to be in the center of the road here
We traveled to Chalk Bluff just north of St. Francis. It is an important location in the Civil War as the Union and Confederate soldiers battled back and forth for ownership of this area.
We wound down a small narrow road and 6 miles later ended in a little park. There was a small playground and picnic area. It had begun to sprinkle so we grabbed our umbrellas and headed out on our walk of the trails to the battlefield.
We stopped along the way to read the historical data plaques.
The trail looped us down to the river and then back up to the parking area.
No real “field” to see as the river and the bluff, now overgrown with thick foliage, were the grounds for the battles that took place here.
Oscar especially liked the opportunity to get out and exercise his little legs; but man, we have got to train this dog not to pull!
Of course, Legoboy found a toad.
To read more about Chalk Bluff visit: http://www.greatriverroad.com/msouth/chalkbluff.htm
We returned on the same small, winding road and headed through a few small Arkansas towns. Not much was open on a Sunday so we had to make several stops looking for a souvenir or two. We finally found a few Arkansas Razorback items and the kids were happy to call those their AK memorabilia.
Legoboy did Sister Bear’s hair to pass the time
and I tried to figure out what road to take next
A stop at the Sugar Shack filled the kids with brightly colored ice cream treats
Our travels are a bit of a zigzag today. We next needed north toward Kentucky. Because we are crossing back over the Mississippi River we have to pick a road that has an access across.
We thought we would ride a ferry across but our ice cream stop and some heavy raining slowed us down to miss the last ferry of the night by just a few minutes.
We continued north to the border of Illinois, about another 15 minutes north of where we were, and crossed over to the east side of the Mississippi River
the road immediately turned and we crossed over the Ohio River.
Both bridges were massive and there were large barges pushing water freight.
We crossed into Kentucky and a mile or two up the road, as the sun was getting low, we stopped at the confluence (the intersection of the two rivers). There was a massive 100ft white granite cross as a memorial at the site. It was quite an impressive presentation.
The water was peaceful and calm and the boats glided gracefully through the water pushing their cargo as the sun dipped low on the horizon.
We continued south through Kentucky looking for a local restaurant to catch some dinner. As we were now nearing 8pm on a Sunday evening we found finding anything open to be a challenge so we settled for some McDonald’s, yuck!
We continued south and crossed into Tennessee.
We want to go to Nashville tomorrow so we continued on in the dark a few hours and found a campground about an hour outside of Nashville where the kids can swim in the morning and I can do some laundry.