A New Adventure Every Day

Hello Everyone,

We have been having a great time exploring new places and meeting many new people each day. On Wednesday, June 12th, we were in Starved Rock State Park, near Oglesby, Illinois, where we took a short hike up to the top of Starved Rock overlooking the Illinois River. Mom took some great pictures of pelicans using her new long-range telephoto lens. Then we hiked through the woods to see several waterfalls and meet more people. We were surprised to see there was a lot of flood damage from the storms that hit this area a few weeks ago. Workers were busy trying to clean mud and debris from the parking lots and the grounds around the visitor's center.

Later that day we drove to DeWitt, Iowa, and on Thursday, June 13th, we explored Maquoketa Caves, State Park. Yep, we went caving, where I made many new friends including State Park employees, school groups, and other people crawling through the caves with us. It was fun, but I got my feet wet and muddy in the caves. Below are pictures of the cave entrance, a natural bridge near the cave entrance and a balanced rock at the other end of the "ballroom cave" (the biggest one in the park).

Later on Thursday we drove to Ames, Iowa and on Friday explored Ledges State Park but couldn't do any hiking because it was raining pretty hard. It was really neat though because there were several places we crossed the creek that runs through the park by driving through it. See below:

So we left and drove to Sioux City, Iowa, then crossed the river into Nebraska where we are staying in a nice place in South Sioux City, Nebraska. We arrived early, around 2:00 PM, so we went to see another state park. Stone State Park is actually in Sioux City Iowa, back across the Missouri River.

This state park is one of the places that Lewis and Clark wrote about in their journals describing their expedition sanctioned to by President Jefferson to explore and map the Louisiana Purchase in 1804😊.