Road Trips and Hike Reports

  Thursday We headed out from our hotel and visited the Harry S Truman Library and museum.  It came recommended from Dan and David and is the kind of thing I like to do but hadn't planned on doing this trip.  The museum is fantastic and seems to be just coming off a very successful remodel.  There were a lot of interesting exhibits and they had the best interactive touch screen exhibits I've ever seen.  We didn't spend too much time there because we had a drive to do and I already know a fair bit about Truman but it is undoubtedly one of the best museums of that type.   The drive to Manhattan went by relatively quickly other than that the museum had taken us 10 miles further east of Kansas City.  I meandered around the southern side of KC suburbia until we got into Kansas and then suburbia died out pretty quickly and higher speed driving set in.  The rest of the trip was quite speedy thanks to Kansas's generous speed limits.     We arrived in Manhattan at about 3 pm.  W

We spent the day doing basic getting to know you stuff here in Kansas City.  I walked 2 blocks downhill to get bagels in the morning.  This entire area (Power & Light district) of KC is very gentrified and newly developed or re-developed.  The bagel shop looks like a hipster coffee shop with mismatched but pretty wooden tables and an old time glass case for the bagels etc.  Those types of places always rub me a little as trying too hard but the bagel was at least adequate.   Then we walked to the River Market district about 10 blocks away.  On the way we visited the central library .  The library was large and clean and had a few gallery spaces etc in it.  I thought the very political installation about native Americans was kind of whiny but Brian thought it was powerful.  There were some homeless people there and one very odd guy seemed to always be near us at the library and then when we left he absolutely followed us until we exited.  He was very odd.  Overall, Kansas City does

Brian drove us from Starved Rock to breakfast in Lacon IL and then on to the hike near Forrest City IL.  We drove along the swollen Illinois River for a good part of the trip.  Basically we spent the last 2 or 3 days focused on, hiking near, driving along and looking at the Illinois river.  It was an interesting character in the story of our trip so far.  The setting for the hike was very nice.  Sand Ridge state forest is an isolated quiet spot, we saw only 1 other vehicle and zero people on foot the entire time we were there. It's a nice stand of predominantly pine trees with a sandy soil.  The hike I found on Alltrails was called 'Orange trail' but we found out after an hour that following the orange blazes didn't keep us on track where we planned to be.  Really there was no difference between any of the trails and paths that are blazed. They are all covered in sand, sometimes deep sand, and probably mostly intended for equestrians.  So we used the actual map in Alltr

 Another busy day here in Illinois.  We started off with breakfast in the beautiful large dining room here at the lodge.  Our first hike was at the East end of Starved Rock state park. We walked along the bluff of the Illinois river and up and down two beautiful canyons, Hidden and Hennepin I thnk.  Hennepin canyon in particular is impressive in its height and narrowness.  We only saw one family on our 3.4 mile in and out hike.  As we went farther east from Hennepin, the trail became very muddy.  It was kind of irritating to navigate in spots so when we got to where the trail crosses IL-71, I'd had enough and we retraced our steps.   We returned to the lodge just long enough to shower (bug spray removal mostly) and then head to Marseille Illinois to do laundry and have lunch.  There were closer places for these tasks but I really liked the name of the laundry place 'We Wash That' so off we went.  We had a Beef Roll for lunch at the Illini lounge .  It was heavy duty and fil