September 30, 2011

My daughter is 46 today and it seems like just yesterday that she was a little girl with long blond hair and a zillion freckles.  We drove into Jefferson City and took her and Salom along with baby Tristan out to dinner .  He is sure a good baby and so darn cute.  We made it home about 9:00 and met Jan and Steve at their motel and then we went out pub crawling, except we only went to one pub and didn't have to crawl out.  We have this nice little micro brewery in the old Powell Hardware building.  This is a nice addition to Rolla and it is quite busy in there so maybe they will do OK.

September 29, 2011

We broke camp and went into town for breakfast at the Zepher Cafe in Piedmont.  They had a good breakfast but I was the only woman customer in the whole place and there were certainly lots of men in there.  We went back to the park and hitched up the trailer and headed for home, arriving here early in the afternoon so we were able to unpack the trailer and get it ready for winter.

September 28, 2011

Big Springs

Yount Church

We drove over to Van Buren and Big Springs and hiked on the Slough Trail.  We took a picture of the Yount Baptist Church outside Van Buren.  Hardy talked to a lady about the church's name and she said she thought the name came from a Yount who had worked on the church years ago.  She knew Younts and Sitzes in the Marble Hill and Bessville area.  We stopped at a roadside park outside Piedmont on MO34 and took a picture then went to Gad's Hill near DesArc on MO 49.  This is the sight of the first train robbery by Jesse James gang on January 31, 1874.  There is a large tailing pile from a mine next to the railroad and the railroad goes to Poplar Bluff. 

September 27, 2011

On highway 34 east of Silva and highway 67, there is an 1860 cemetery in Wayne County.  I took a picture of an old barn with the name B.G. Ho..dagson.  We picked up an artesian well geocache outside Glen Allen.  There was water gushing from the pipe at the well and Hardy filled one of the water bottles.  We then went on to Saddlebrook Subdivision and cache in Cape Girardeau Co.  This is a pretty area and several new mansions for sale with one costing $350K.  The entry to Saddlebrook was very pretty with man made waterfalls and shrubs on both sides of the road.  Some of the houses in the subdivision are built around man made lakes but  they were all pretty and well maintained.  We left that county and stopped at an 1879 single land bridge with a wooden deck at Old Appleton and a cache at Apple Creek's St Joseph Church in Perry County.  This is a very beautiful shrine and in the bottom of a small sink hole with a natural waterfall.  The alter was placed June 7, 1973.  They also had a very friendly cat that liked to leg crawl and it was hard to get him to leave us alone long enough for us to drive away.

We drove on to Yount, MO in Perry County but it is not marked on the highway so we think we drove through it without really noticing it was there.  We decided it must have been the area that had a farm house and a barn with a bridge over the Whitewater Creek.  We drove into Fredricktown and picked up two caches at cemeteries.  We also went to a "cut" on the highway off 72.  There are old lava beds making dikes across the road that the highway department has cut through for the road.

All in all this was a great day.  I found a small inch worm working his way up my pant leg.  They are unique little critters.

September 26, 2011

We packed up the camper and took off for Sam A Baker State Park down near Piedmont, MO. This park is from 1927 and named for Governor Sam Baker, a local resident. The park is very nice and had very little activity at this time of year.  Sam A. Baker State Park, located in the Francois mountain range, in Patterson, Missouri, is one of the oldest in the park system and perhaps the most classic. We set up camp them went out to explore a little.  We found a stray cat that was very friendly and I would have taken him if we didn't travel around so much.  Later after dinner we were sitting outside when Hardy noticed the cat running by.  I looked quickly and said to him that it wasn't the cat but a skunk wandering through.  A little later as we were sitting there, Mr. Pepe came back through our camp.  He stopped and sniffed at my foot then wandered through the camp on his way to the next campsite.  The next campsite had a little dog that was barking and then let out a short yip and we could smell the skunk shortly after that.


We went to Fort Benton near Patterson, MO in Wayne county.  This was a union held fort which is now on the national historic registry and maintained by Wayne County.  This is the artist, Joe Huett's conception of how Fort Benton may have looked.  Fort Benton is a Civil War Fort, built by Union troops on the hill behind the old school in Patterson, MO, between 1861-1863.  The Fort measures about 150 sq ft.  The internal packed earth walls may have been 5 ft high using 2 in thick vertical plans on the inside.  Outer walls were of packed earth and Gunny sacks filled with earth topped the wall.

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We drove to Clearwater Lake in Reynolds County to find "The Well's Gone Dry", a geocache at an abandoned Corp of Engineers campground.   The pump is an old NFS style pump with a tank.  There is no sign of the old campground left but it was a nice drive to the lake.Clearwater Lake is a reservoir on the Black River six miles from Piedmont, Missouri. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers uses Clearwater for flood control in the White and lower Mississippi River Basins.  Construction began in 1940 but was halted temporarily at the advent of World War II. Clearwater Lake Dam opened in 1948.  

Piedmont, MO

Piedmont has a WalMart and McDonald's so it is a nice town to camp near. It is near to Sam A Baker and sits in a fairly narrow valley and quite pretty.