Cool for July 2, but I know the heat will return. Such are Northern summers. Tomorrow isn’t a holiday, but it ought to be. Back to posting on Sunday.

The bridge that crosses the Mississippi from Savanna, Illinois, to Sabula, Iowa, is exactly wide enough for two vehicles, and no wider. It’s a steel truss bridge, and more than 80 years old. These facts alone make it a thrill to drive across, but a conscientious – make that sane – driver isn’t going to take in the view of the Father of Waters while crossing; he has to leave that to his passengers.

The main steel structure on the Iowa side eventually gives way to a much longer and slightly wider causeway that passes through high waters and lush green islands. At that point it’s Iowa 64, and also US 52. The last time I drove over such watery lushness was in Louisiana bayou country.

North from Sabula to Dubuque is also US 52, and a branch of the Great River Road. At this point, Illinois 84 (and a bit of US 20) is the branch of the Great River Road on the opposite bank, in Illinois. We spent a fair amount of time on both roads the weekend before last, and I can say one thing: bikers are fond of the Great River Road. We saw a lot of them on the roads and parked in various towns along the way. They weren’t usually young men, but mostly wizened fellows, probably out for the weekend.

The Great River Road is actually a chain of state and local roads passing through 10 states from Louisiana to Minnesota, or vice versa if you travel the other way. It’s a National Scenic Byway totaling over 2,000 miles, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Signs along the way look like this (and in fact we drove past this exact place).

We stopped for a moment in Bellevue, Iowa, on US 52 to take a peek at Lock & Dam No. 12. There’s a small roadside park that offers a nice vantage of the structure. As I got out of the car to look at the dam, I noticed a young family – husband, wife, child of three or four – also standing in the park, seemingly admiring the structure with more intensity than people usually devote to infrastructure. Odd. (My own family members were in the car.) Maybe they were a couple of young engineers. For the record, the dam creates Pool 12, with a total capacity of 92,000 acre ft. The US Army Corps of Engineers completed it in 1939 and still operates it, and the structure’s been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2004.

The campgrounds at Mississippi Palisades State Park are well-designed and expansive. They don’t cost that much, either: $10 per night for a tent site. But the wet spring and early summer, and probably the close proximity to the Mississippi and many smaller pools of water, also meant we were in close proximity to a lot of bugs. This bothered Lilly and Ann in particular – you should have heard the commotion when they discovered a spider hitchhiking a ride in the back of the car. In the vicinity of the campground itself, mosquitoes mostly weren’t the problem, or maybe our DEET kept those away. Gnats were the biggest nuisance.

By night, they’d all calmed down and the fireflies were out. Gnats = nuisance. Fireflies = joy to behold. They don’t get in your face and they put on a show.