Grafton, IL

We have completed our first river, when we leave here we will be on the Mighty Mississippi.  Time to put away the Illinois river chart book and get out the Mississippi river chart book.  Today was a long one we left the barge in Beardstown before dawn and didn't tie up here until 6:30pm.  Mary had called the LaGrange lock and was told to "start heading down".   Well, when we got there they said it would be about an hour and a half wait, it turned out to be nearly three hours.  We had decided early that we wanted to push on to Grafton, so we had been running a bit faster than the past few days.  At one point where the river widened, we opened up the throttle and actually had some response from the trim tabs, we were going just over 16mph.  We were still tying up when Rich, from Salt n Sand came by and said to stop down by the marina office and meet with all the other Looper's in the harbor.  We had a chance to meet some of the other Looper's currently doing the Loop, which is a fun thing to do. We have already meat so many of our fellow Loopers and find that a great part of this journey.

What we had to wait three hours for.

Had to take a picture of this for the Admiral!

And this for the Grandson's!

Grafton was celebrating it's 175th year celebration with both land and boat parades.  The town was quite busy with a lot going on. It was nice to see a small town of only 600 people having such pride in their town. 

Here are a few shots of the boat parade.

It's hard to imagine that most of the downtown was under water of 1993

A few shots of the sunset from where we were tied up.

After the Sunset we went to Rich and Carol's boat  Salt n Sand to watch the fireworks with Wayne and Francine from My Way and Kerm and Chris from Southern Belle.  It was a double display because the fireworks had been rained out on the fourth of July.

On Sunday we awoke to a beautiful sunrise, but it was short lived and then the rains came which put a damper on the town's planned activities for the day. The antique car show was canceled.  We were able to walk to the Catholic church's fish fry and had a couple of very large fish sandwich's.  So large that we may not need any dinner.

We had planned to use the courtesy car on Monday and do a much needed re-provisioning and then stay  a couple  more days, but  found out that we needed to have our own insurance coverage to use the car.  In our haste to put the house in mothballs, we had cancelled all of our auto coverage except comprehensive.  Plan B is to leave tomorrow and head to Alton where we will rent a car (with their exorbitant daily insurance) and head to a Super Wal Mart, Walgreen's and a computer repair place to have the lap top looked at.

We want to take a moment to thank Rob our brother/ brother n law for watching out for our house and sending us the mail. We would be hard pressed to be able to do this trip with out you and we thank you very much. Also for all of the comments that have come back our way, they really mean a lot to us.
We miss you all,

John & Mary