July 23, 2008 travels from Ft. Madison, IA to Quincy, IL

Today's travels were exciting. We crossed the Mississippi River on the way out of Ft. Madison, Iowa to Illinois 'enmasse' because of some flap about not taking pictures on the toll bridge since 9/11 or something. Anyhow, we crossed the toll bridge and the toll taker must not have known what to do with a bunch of bicyclists because we crossed free. Sandy, in the truck, had to pay. The trip took us to Nauvoo, Illinois for breakfast (yummy and cheap) and then into the town to visit. Nauvoo is a contrasting town where tolerance seemed quite absent in it's history. Seems as though the Mormon Church settled there and the locals were not too pleased and ran them out of town after a great deal of angst. Not quit sure of the whole story because they built a huge Temple and education center which we visited so while they were kicked out, some of them managed to remain here while the rest headed to Salt Lake City in Utah (where we visited long ago)

One of the 'displays' was the home of Johnathan Browning. He was the inventor of the Browning Machine Gun but a ton of other things as well. The son of a farmer, he decided he didn't want to farm so he bacame a blacksmith, gunsmith and inventor. He invented special house nails and the house had a well inside so they had indoor plumbing long before anyone else. Very interesting.

Further travels led us through Illinois along the Mississippi River with flooded fields and sandbagged houses. A bad day of biking beats a good day of anything else but I'm glad we don't live in such a flooded out area. We had to re-route part of the journey because the road we were to travel was flooded out. All in a day's riding. Some folks still seem to rebuild year after year rather than move. To each their own. A bunch of pictures follow: