Rt 66 is mostly famous for being famous. The road has been rerouted several times. We rode along a stretch where the 1930 - 1940 roadbed lies paralel to the current road.
I've ridden on roads in worse shape than 1940 vintage Rt 66.
After a while we switched from Rt 66 to bike trails. Some trails were shady - a big plus on a warm day. But we also ran into some obstacles along the trails.
Shady patches were few and far between on this trail.
The Mississippi River is a working river. We saw lots of industrial sites along the river.
The confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers is behind us. Lewis and Clark spent the winter in the area behind us before embarking on their journey to the Pacific.
We stopped at the National Great Rivers museum, run by the army corps of engineers. Our museum guide Jason was informative and entertaining. The museum is next to a pair of locks that serve both recreational and commercial traffic. Use of the locks is free for recreational vehicles, a lock will service even a single kayak.
The locks are funded by a 29 cents per gallon tax paid by commercial tug boats. A tug has a 100,000 gallon tank that has to be filled every 5-6 days, so the taxes add up quickly. The tax was raised from 14 cents per gallon to 29 cents per gallon at the request of the tug boat lines because the locks were in such poor repair.
The 1200 foot long main lock can handle a tug and 15 barges. The 600 foot long auxiliary lock can handle only 9 barges. The water above the auxiliary lock seemed to be full of weeks worth of trash. Jason explained that we were looking at about 10 hours accumulation of flotsam. A volunteer group removes the trash daily, then the organic debris is released downstream through the lock. It will lodge on banks and sandbars downstream, where it provides good habitat for animals.
We are spending the night in the hills town of Alton. In 1837, the Presbyterian pastor Elijah Lovejoy started the first anti-slavory society in Illinois. Two weeks later he was killed.
Hallowed ground. The first anti-slavory society meeting was held in this building in Alton. Later it became a stop on the underground railroad.
