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May 22, 2003

Start:   Canal CG, COE, Grand Rivers KY
End:     Hardy RV Park, Hardy AR
Miles:   248
Hi Temp: 81.5
Lo Temp: 57.4

We were out of Grand Rivers KY at 9am after breakfast.

Then we wandered westward on US-68 to the bridge over the Ohio.  The river is high, but not too high.  We could see Cairo, Illinios, across the river, with a lot of tugboats and barges at the waterfront.

We crossed over the Ohio on a narrow bridge into Illinois, turned left, and got onto another narrow bridge over the Mississippi and wound up in Missouri. It took longer to type this than to do it.

Then we found US-62 and took it south and west.  We spent many miles still in the Mississippi flood plain - very flat land.  The main crop is corn, with some grain being grown. We saw some fields with small plowed-up ridges across them that were flooded from irrigation ditches - turned out to be rice growing.

As we entered Arkansas, I began to get anxious about the fuel level in the truck.  We hadn't seen a diesel pump in quite a while.  We stopped at a Texaco that showed "Diesel" on its sign, but the station turned out to be new and hadn't yet opened for business.  But the people there told us where to find some - in Corning, down the road.  We stopped there and fueled. Of course, we saw diesel pumps in nearly every town after that.

We didn't find any lunch places to our liking, so we kept going into Hardy.  Hardy has a municipal RV park on the Spring River a block from downtown. We grabbed a nibble to keep us going and walked the block.  Downtown has a bunch of interesting shops and other tourist/money separators.  We bought a little block of fudge and some pickled tiny corn and looked through several shops. One of our shopping problems is that we'll have to ship it home or carry it 16,000 miles.

One feature of this RV park that might discourage some folks is that there is a train track about 75 yards away, halfway to the downtown.  This line was once a SL&SF route; now it's used by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad for high-speed traffic (containers and automobile cars). We also saw one all-coal high-speed train.

After we walked back to the trailer, we read for a bit.  Then we ate a turkey, pasta, and salad dinner and killed last night's white wine. We washed the dishes, then Dolores complained of the taste of the water.  So I drained, filled, drained, and filled the hot water heater.  Then I drained, filled, drained, and filled the on-board water tank.  We turned on the hot water heater and we'll see in the morning what Dolores thinks of the taste.

The neighbor came over to chat.  He lives outside Chicago, in the Fox River Valley below St Charles on US-30. He grew up here. I told him of our trip, and he told me some things about the area. He has a '97 Dodge truck with Cummins diesel, so we talked trucks for a while.  Nice guy.

It was sunny and clear all day, so when the sun went down it got cool quickly. We went inside and settled.