A mixed-bag kind of day

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  Paducah, Kentucky
Thursday, October 20, 2011

I stayed up too late last night, watching Game 1 of the World Series, so we slept in this morning.  Yesterday as I realized that I would be driving right past St. Louis, I tuned in to local sports radio for most of the afternoon, and enjoyed listening to the hometown excitement before the big game.  The game also meant that I shorted Lily on her evening walk, so I decided to get in an extra long, extra vigorous walk this morning.  We awoke to a glorious fall morning, crisp and sunny.  I picked Giant City State Park for our adventure and it was lovely.  It was also muddy.  Very muddy.  Of course the mud boots that I made sure to bring along?  Yep, left them in the car.  So there I was, slipping and sliding in my tennies, trekking through the woods with Lily excitedly pulling me along to check out every new smell.  I only fell once, remarkably, and 1.5 hours later we made it back to the car. 

The rest of the day was a mixed bag.  I wanted to finish the part of the Great River Road that I had planned, down to Cairo, IL where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers converge.  We hit one spot on the road, at Thebes, where we could actually see the river, but otherwise it was fairly dense forest and increasingly depressed towns. We finally made it to Cairo, another hard-hit place, and Fort Defiance which lies right at the confluence.  The park had clearly been hit with the floods this spring and was kind of a mess, but it still gave us a nice view.

The Ohio River has its own scenic byway, similar to the Great River Road, and I had planned to spend a couple of days taking it up to Lexington.  Unfortunately I found that while the drive is very pretty, it only parallels the Ohio, but you never actually see the river on the drive.  At least not the part we did today.  Plus my late start threw off our schedule and I was hungry and couldn't find anywhere to eat.  So I kind of had the cranky pants on today. I finally gave in as we approached Paducah, KY and decided to call it a day and start again tomorrow.

On the other hand, the day was beautiful, with big blue skies studded with fluffy white clouds.  It was windy, but got warmer as the day went on and this evening was quite pleasant.  

Oh - and I got to see Superman!

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Giant city state park	Blue Skies	Ahhhh!	Confluence of Ohio and Mississippi
Superman!	Paducah Murals	Ohio River Late Afternoon	Atomic Age Mural   Comments!
Illinois Central Railroad Monument	Sunset in Paducah

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