May 25 - Lock # 11 (mile 583) to Bellevue, IA (mile 555)

After almost two weeks on the river, today was my first uneventful day. It was a perfect day for being out in a kayak. The temperature was in the low 70s, there was no humidity to speak of, and there was a light breeze from the southwest of less than 5 mph. No rain, no thunderstorms and lightning to hide from, and very little powerboat traffic, given that it was a long weekend. It took only 7 hours to do 28 miles.

Having said that, I didn't take full advantage of the good conditions. To begin with, I started late, around 11 in the morning. I was cold overnight and didn't sleep much, I needed to sort out and dry out some of my gear, and I was admittedly a bit slow and sluggish. Once on the water I couldn't get a steady rhythm going, I was fidgeting and couldn't get comfortable in the boat. On a day like this I should have done better than 4 mph. Anyway, it was good to do 28 miles without having to paddle flat out all day long.

Tomorrow my vacation is over - the forecast calls for 15 to 20 mph wind and thunderstorms for the next few days. I stopped at Spruce Harbor to fill up my water bottles. I didn't see any public areas, so I walked up to one of the cabins. Before I knew it, I was invited in to fill up with bottled water from the fridge. I would have been quite happy to use the hose outside, but people are so consistently exceeding my expectations that I should be getting used to it by now.

My late father was a generous man. He always gave something to people who came to our door - food, money, a drink of water - and he never sent anybody away empty handed. Every so often he would give a person something extra, for no apparent reason. When that happened again one day, I asked him why he did it. I'll never forget his answer: "He had a good story."
I have a good story too, and that also opens doors for me.

I had one of the more surreal moments of my journey this afternoon. I was waiting above Lock # 12 for my turn through the lock. On the Illinois side of the river is a vast, restricted military training area. It stretches for 16 miles along the river, and all the way east to the Burlington-Santa Fe Railroad.

From a distance, the terrain looks a lot like the jungles in South East Asia and along the Mekong river. The illusion was further enforced by a helicopter flying over the area a few miles inland. Below the lock, in Bellevue, a rock concert was in progress, and late 60s and early 70s vintage rock came floating up the river. For a brief moment, I was in the scene from Apocalypse Now where the patrol boat arrives at a forward supply base, with the all the bright lights and music blaring over the loudspeakers. Weird.

A note of caution about the 100% DEET: It will eat through plastic, watch straps, and synthetic fabric; and it should be kept away from small children, pets and dictators who want to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

I started above Dubuque this morning. It's an attractive city; very much a working city, with a number of impressive old and new money mansions spread out along the Iowa bank. Along Harrington Slough and around Spruce Harbor, the houses and cottages look they have been left unchanged since the 50s. One gets the feeling that they are passed on to the next generation, and always stay in the same families.

It would appear that people along this part of the river can not live, work, relax or play without some kind of internal combustion engine. In nearly two weeks, and 300 miles on the river, I saw exactly one - count them - watercraft not powered by an engine. During my second day of crossing Lake Pepin, I saw a guy in a canoe that was rigged with a set of oars like a single scull.
At some point below Dubuque I crossed the state line from Wisconsin into Illinois. There was no sign (or X) to mark the spot.

The landscape along the river changed after Dubuque. The bluffs are lower and the scenery opens up. Below Bellevue, the west bank dropped to only a few feet above the river, and I caught a glimpse of the rolling Iowa farm country beyond the river.

Turkey vultures look very impressive when they circle high up in the sky, but on the ground they are quite ungainly and not at all elegant. They look like chickens or deranged pheasants.