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From the satellite photos, this little lighthouse is generally 70 or 80 feet from the water and there are four or five more light posts that are submerged. Clearly, the levees here are high enough to handle a lot more water. But if this were to be breached, the major part of this little town would be submerged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next leg of my trip was from Clinton to West Branch for a quick visit to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. Again, two lane roads, this time almost all state routes rather than US highways. I don\u2019t think I had to pass anybody the whole way from Naperville, other than in the towns. I’m sure I’m sounding like a broken record when I say how much more I prefer the small roads to the interstates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t spend a lot of time at the library. I watched the film that they show hourly and toured the exhibits in the museum. And, of course, the gift shop. For some reason, they have a bunch of trinkets related to ancient Egypt. I don\u2019t recall Hoover having any connections, but I could be forgetting. In the museum was a hunk of the Berlin wall. Again, I’m pretty sure he had no specific connection to the Berlin wall, but it was cool to see it. In general, I don’t go around touching museum exhibits, but I couldn’t resist this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of the building is off-limits to the public, so I had to ask: If I were to be writing a book about, say, Belgian relief, could I get access to the library? The answer was that all I\u2019d need to do is get a research license, which is about as hard to obtain as a library card. In the mean time, I was free to ask any of the staff researchers questions and they\u2019d do their best to respond. Interesting. Not that I\u2019m planning on writing about Hoover. Or anybody else, for that matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Hoover library is only a few hundred yards from I-80. I\u2019ve driven by here many times and never bothered to stop. Or even notice how close it was. Add this to the long list of places I ignored because I was in too big of a hurry on the Interstate. The more I avoid those roads, the happier I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third leg of the day was from West Branch southwest to join US 36 somewhere in Missouri, then as far west as I could get. I had the endpoint tentatively at Bethany, Missouri. I reached Bethany before 6:00pm; clearly too early to stop. In my first iteration of the plan, weeks ago, I was looking at St. Joseph. As it turns out, I made it to Hiawatha, Kansas, about forty miles farther. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the reasons I don\u2019t drive after dark is the danger of animals. This was illustrated perfectly just a few miles before Hiawatha. I came upon what I thought was debris in my lane. It wasn\u2019t obvious to me at first what it was. Then I saw it was moving. Slowly. It was a good sized turtle, moving from left to right and about where my drivers side tires belonged. I avoided it, and the smaller turtle a few yards past it, which had almost reached the shoulder. I sure hope they both made it. Frankly, I\u2019m a bit amazed they didn\u2019t get clobbered by the clump of traffic about a quarter mile ahead of me: two semis, two tour buses, a motorhome, and two cars. I have no idea how they all managed to miss both turtles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My minor irritations with technology continued. As soon as I pulled up to the hotel, my phone decided it didn’t want to talk to anybody. I had no cell service and no GPS. At first I thought it was just the cell service that was lacking. But I saw other people yakking on their phones and spotted a cell tower a short distance away. All was good after rebooting the phone. I guess the day wouldn’t have been complete without some sort of technical glitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the key events of Herbert Hoover\u2019s tenure as Secretary of\nCommerce was his relief work in the aftermath of the Great\nMississippi Flood of 1927. This was the most destructive river flood\nin the history of the United States. Twenty seven thousand square\nmiles of land was inundated and 630,000 people were displaced from\ntheir homes. To try to prevent future floods, the federal government\ncreated the world\u2019s longest system of levees and floodways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yesterday, one of these levees failed in the West Quincy area, and\nother levees were breached along the Arkansas river as well. Luckily,\nI was in neither of those places and saw nothing so dramatic.\nHowever, I did drive by a huge amount of acreage that was under\nwater. Not being from the area, I can\u2019t look at a river and tell if\nit\u2019s high compared to other severe flooding years, but every river\nI saw looked very high. At Clinton, all the access stairs leading\ndown to the river were closed, and lampposts on the river side of the\nlevee were under water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Missouri, just east of the Mississippi, there\u2019s the Platte River. This is not the same one that flows through Denver an on through Nebraska. I didn\u2019t know there was another one. This one is sometimes called the Little Platte River. This Platte was well out of its banks, flooding perhaps a half mile on each side of the river. Most of Iowa and Missouri that I traversed through the day was rolling terrain, so there wasn’t much flooding to see. But quite a bit of land on the Kansas side of the Missouri is flooded as well as large areas of Illinois that I drove through. Of course, I also mentioned flooding last weekend through the section of Illinois that I went through farther south.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We aren\u2019t in need of someone to do what Hoover did 90 years ago (feed and house more than half a million people), although there are still quite a few people affected by the high water. But I think I can say that the levee system did what it was intended to do (regardless of other good or bad side-effects). In 2011, the Mississippi rose a foot higher than back in 1927. And the flooding along the Missouri this year is worse than it was in 2011. But the damage and displacement of people is far, far less than back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today\u2019s miles: 525 road Total miles: 2,254 road, 407 track<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A fairly straight-forward and uneventful drive through Kansas and eastern Colorado. I well remember last year\u2019s range anxiety on this same road. Today I filled up in Smith Center, Kansas, three hundred miles to Byers. I\u2019d been getting a bit over 33mpg and figured I could make it easily. Just the same, I topped off the tank at my lunch stop in St. Francis, at the last working gas pump before HPR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today\u2019s miles: 524 road Total miles: 2,778 road, 407 track<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Total trip miles: 3,185<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Day 8 \u2013 Saturday, June 1 Slightly late start to the day. On weekends the hotel starts breakfast at 7 instead of 6. My plan was to have the car loaded before 7 so I could be out as early … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/grunschev.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/IMG_4774p.jpg?fit=584%2C219\")
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Day 9 \u2013 Sunday, June 2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n