Day 27 - Arrival at the Missouri River

Day 27 - Sunday

Yesterday I finally figured out how to create the blog, and posted the 26 day travelogue you've hopefully already read.  I got feedback from a friend that it took a long time to read (not surprisingly for 35 pages!) so from now on I'll post each day's musings as a separate post.  May not post every day - in fact I'm already behind as I write this - so several posts may appear at once, but they'll all be relatively short.

Sunday morning we were out of the park by 9:30am and heading north on US Highway 81 towards South Dakota.  Vicky drove, and the first stretch, as far as the town of Norfolk, was a 4 lane divided highway so relatively easy.  After Norfolk it went down to 2 lanes and by the time we arrived at the Corps of Discovery Welcome Center, just south of Yankton SD,  Vicky was tired.  We stopped for a rest and were a little disappointed to discover that the "Welcome Center" was little more than a gift shop.  However, the grounds  had come plantings of trees and herbs, and a lot of historical plaques.  There was also a viewpoint from which we could see the bridge over the Missouri River.

We learned about US 81, locally known as the Meridian Highway.  The original concept for the Meridian Road, started in 1911, was an international road connecting Winnipeg Manitoba in Canada with Mexico City.  It roughly followed the so called 6th Meridian (97 degrees West Longitude), and the current US81 is now part of the Pan American Highway which connects Winnipeg with Tierra Del Fuego in southern Chile (minus a stretch between Panama and Columbia that has been closed for reasons connected with illegal immigration!).  We traveled on parts of the PAA in Central and South America on shore excursions as part of our epic cruise from San Diego to Buenos Aires a couple of years ago.  I'd always assumed the US portion went through the Rockies or the West Coast, but now I know better!

We also learned more about the Lewis and Clark expedition a/k/a Corps of Discovery.  In case you don't know, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd US President, to follow the Missouri River to its source and find a route from there to the Pacific Ocean.  Jefferson had just bought a huge tract of land from France (the Louisiana Purchase) and didn't know what he'd bought.  (For that matter, Napoleon Bonaparte didn't know what he had sold!).  Some years ago we visited Fort Clatsop, just south of Astoria Oregon, which is where the Corps of Discovery spent a very wet and dreary winter after reaching the Pacific.  This, and the very readable book Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, spurred our interest in the expedition and one of our goals for this summer is to follow much of the route Lewis and Clark took in 1804.

One spot, where the explorers held a council with the Yankton Sioux leaders, is Calumet Bluff on the south bank of the Missouri opposite Yankton, and this is where we're staying tonight.  The bluff itself is no longer there, thanks to the Gavin's Point Dam, one of 5 built in the 1950's to stop the periodic flooding and villages next to the river as well as to generate electric power.  We're at the Cottonwood Campground on an island in the river, which is where the US Army Corps of Engineers camped when they were building the dam.  It's now a delightfully shady campground and we have a site with views of the Lewis and Clark Lake, which was formed by the dam.

We arrived around 1pm to find that our site was still occupied by the previous night's campers - OK since check-out is 2pm and check-in 4pm.  We unhitched the car, parked the RV in the parking lot and drove into Yankton to check out the town and have lunch.  After inventive burgers - mine had jalapeños and cream cheese and Vick's had cole slaw - we got back around 4:30 to find the people were still there!  We spoke to the campground staff who went and spoke to them.  Turned out they are local people who come regularly for the weekend.  This was a  3 day weekend (Monday is Memorial Day) and the wife thought they were booked for 3 nights but in fact it was only 2.  They took about a half hour to pack up and leave, and we were able to set up.

There were some benches along the banks of what I thought was the river but turned out to be the lake, so we sat there to watch the sun set and enjoy the birds (mostly robins).  Motorized watercraft appeared to be banned, so it was a tranquil spot and we had a quiet night.  The address  was in Nebraska but geographically we were spending our first night in South Dakota.