Muscatine to Hamilton

Click the map for route details

Weather
The Iowa weather continued to do its thing, and impressively so. You have seen the weather map, and as the night grew on, I was glad to be in a motel, the horrible internet connection notwithstanding.

I did make the most out of the motel in the morning, and checked out right at 11am. That was fairly good timing as most of the storm system had moved past Muscatine and my path at that point. Muscatine, incidentally, is called Muscatine because no other city in the world has that name, and residents of what was earlier called Bloomington were fed up with their mail getting lost due to confusion with all the other Bloomingtons in the Midwest. Other than that, it is mostly famous for having been the pearl button capital of the world, after Mr. Boepple, a German immigrant, began producing buttons from the clams shells that could be found in great abundance in the Mississippi River. They were great buttons and used world-wide, but then came plastics, and it was all over. Such is progress.

Leaving the AmericInn

The rain still came and went for about an hour, and the Craft Storm Tights held up very well, definitely raingear I could recommend to anyone. The problem is, of course, that if you are really riding, you get wet from the inside, so there is really not much point in wearing any raingear. It is a constant battle between getting soaked and heat exhaustion when you are trying to decide if you should wear raingear or not.

Muscatine Riverfront, the Land of Lincoln beyond the Great River

Muscatine Riverfront. Did someone say "Clean Air Act?"

The final part of my ride through Iowa was as it had been the two previous days, pretty boring at this point and straight into the wind.
About the only thing of note was that I crossed the Iowa River, which is definitely a notable tributary to the Mississippi.

Notable Tributary: Iowa River, Upstream

Burlington
Shortly after the Iowa River, I reached Burlington, home of Snake Alley, a town definitely past its glory days.

Even the churches are being torn down

 
Burlington's traffic lights have not been updated in a while

A touch of New York in Burlington, Iowa

Well, time to leave Iowa behind. About time, I dare say. Highway 34 leads straight across the Mississippi and into Rod R. Blagojevich's territory.

Highway 34 spans the Mississippi

Entering Illinois

Illinois Motorist
We have all heard the horror stories of the drivers in and around Chicago, some of us have experienced them first-hand.
Right after crossing into Illinois, I am riding down a county road without a shoulder and quite a bit of traffic, when I am passed by a big, red F-150 pick-up truck that pulls into the next driveway up ahead. Out gets a stalky man in his fifties, walks around his truck and flags me down to stop. I, afraid of nothing, stop and look him straight in the eye. Before I can even say hello, he pulls out a bottle of water and offers it to me: "Are you all right? I saw you stopped back there and wanted to make sure you weren't overheatin'." Indeed, I had stopped about a mile back to change to the next map, which is where he had spotted me and turned around only to offer me some water. I thankfully declined his water because I had just filled up in Burlington, we exchanged some pleasantries, and got back on our respective ways.

See? It's not just all road rage out there.

Nauvoo
Nauvoo is a bit of a special place. You are riding through Illinois and, all of a sudden, you are in Utah.

Joe Smith was here

Say what? The official history has it thusly (comments in [] are mine):

"Nauvoo was once the site of a Sauk and Fox village. After the Indians moved west of the Mississippi [as in: "Eh, Chief, we've been here for hundreds of years now, and it's getting kind of boring. Can't we move somewhere else and just give this land to those white newcomers?" — "Hm. Okay, let's just pack up and leave. Okay, bye. Have fun with the land, white man."], promoters attempted to develop town sites here but the marshy bottom lands attracted few settlers [Eyes once again bigger than ability. White man wants land, but white man doesn't know what to do with it.].
In 1839, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith [Jr., actually] chose the town, then called Commerce, as the home for his followers, who had been driven from Missouri. The Mormons named the community Nauvoo, said to mean [in Hebrew] "Beautiful Place," and obtained a special charter from the Illinois legislature [who did not want to deal with a constant headache], which gave the city government its own courts, militia, university, and all other governmental powers not prohibited by the federal and state constitutions.
Mormon converts from all parts of America and Europe soon swelled the population to about 15,000 making Nauvoo one of the largest cities in Illinois by 1845 [Illinois was really full of cities in 1845, so that's a big deal.]. But some of the Mormons as well as their gentile neighbors began to resent the civil and religious authority [read: despotism] of the Mormon leaders, and frictions in the area grew severe. When the Nauvoo city council had an anti-mormon newspaper destroyed, the Mormon leaders were arrested and jailed at Carthage. There, on June 27, 1844, an armed mob shot and killed Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum. Conflict between the Mormons and their neighbors continued until 1846 when the Mormons completed their exodus from the state [and went on to Utah, led by Brigham Young].
In 1849, Etienne Cabet's followers, the Icarians [an inspiration to the great Karl Marx], came to Nauvoo to practice their form of religious communism, but dissensions soon weakened the colony [I guess communes didn't really work back then, either.]. Their experiment lasted less than ten years."

Towards Hamilton
The rest of the day was a leisurely ride along the Mississippi as the sun was slowly going down over the Mississippi. Beautiful.

Fertile Mississippi River Banks

The first pelicans

Scenic Mississippi River Route

Out fishing in the evening

Red-winged blackbirds harrassing someone else for a change

Mayflies
By popular demand (hat tip to Bobby), here a little more on mayflies. Mayflies are indeed know to fly in late June or early July. Perhaps they are called mayflies because they may fly in June or July. A better name then would be may-or-may-not-fly. In any case, they are born from eggs at the bottom of the Mississippi, turn into worms, which can live at the bottom of the river anywhere from a few months to several years. Then they suddenly turn into adults, and the females have only about 24 hours to live after that. Interestingly, they do not have mouths. I guess if you only have 24 hours to live, you don't really need to eat. During that time the females have to mate, which they do in flight, and the males actually have to fly upside down to attach themselves to the females, which will release eggs over the river, which sink to the bottom. The female dies, and the cycle repeats. The males are what you see fluttering around lights at night, they keep going until they exhaust themselves (no mouth, remember?), and they, too, die. Alternatively, they may be eaten by red-winged blackbirds, as seen in the picture above, if you look closely.

And thus the cycle of life continues. Here is a mayfly hanging out in Burlington, waiting to die.

Mayfly hanging out in Burlington

Mississippi River Crossings
Today, finally, back to the Great River and another river crossing to report. It's a little crooked, but it was a three-lane highway with no shoulder, so I did not feel like stopping.

Mississippi River Crossing 25 - Downstream

Road Kill Tally
A fairly quiet day on the roads today, probably because of the rain. The frogs clearly used the moisture to move up in the rankings, but perhaps the most significant move came from the Opossum, which moved itself from the obscure mid-field to a podium position. Is this the beginning of the campaign we have all been waiting for?

1. Racoon: 62
2. Skunk: 16
3. Opossum: 15
4. Groundhog: 13
5. Deer: 12
6. Cat: 12
7. Frog: 12
8. Squirrel: 9
9. Mouse: 7
10. Snake: 5
11. Bunnywabbit: 5
12. Turtle: 4
13. Fox: 3
14. Mole: 2
15. Dog: 2
16. Porcupine: 1
17. Chipmunk: 1

• Bird: 54