Apr 30, bottom lands and Mormons

This morning we had a beautiful morning view of the river and the bridges out our hotel window. Once we got started, we had a beautiful tailwind and flat roads to Warsaw, IL.  The first stretch was on the appropriately-named Bottom Road as it went along the bottom of the bluff which was on the right, with bottomlands on the left. Even after leaving Bottom Road, the roads usually were right at the base of the bluff with the farm fields stretching away to our left.  When we got to Warsaw we turned up a hill and continued onto the main street where we found Jennifer's diner and stopped for lunch. Jim had the meat loaf special and Kay a Monte Cristo sandwich.  We asked about a large multistory abandoned brick building we had seen on the outskirts of town, and Jennifer informed us it had been a shoe factory and then a battery factory, which ended up contaminating the site with radiation.  At Hamilton we recognized a stretch of the road from a fall 2020 bike trip we took on the Katy Trail and across Missouri. We had crossed the river here on our way back to our central Illinois starting point, but on this trip we didn't have to pedal up the hill here! We saw a sign stating no camping  for the next 12 miles and we could see why it would have been tempting to camp--the road went along the Mississippi with open land in between.  

When we got to Nauvoo, we found that the state park was right in town, which made us less enthused about camping there.  It was right across the highway from the historic Mormon section where the Mormons had settled after being driven out of Missouri and lived for a number of years until further unrest and the murder of Joseph Smith led most of them to emigrate to Utah. At the time, the city was about the same size as Chicago.  We turned into the historic section, not sure what we would find and ended up taking a tour of the house where Joseph Smith  and his family lived, and a couple other historical buildings.  The tour guides we had were LDS volunteers in period dress who had come from different parts of the country to spend a few months of their retirement volunteering here. One couple were retired postal workers, another used to be a CFO. 

   We decided to ride up into the state park and found out that no one was camping in the non-electric area and only a few people up the road in the electric section, so we decided to camp here after all. The non-electric section was a large grassy area with a number of trees and picnic tables and no designated individual sites. We picked out a spot with a number of trees scattered around us by one of the picnic tables but we were thankful we weren't right under the closest tree as a small branch fell off!  Some pretty white flowers were blooming in the grass around us.  

We took a walk and discovered a small lake beyond us, then up past the other camping section were some trails going off into a wooded area beyond.  We even saw some deer as we walked the trails.  So the park turned out to be much more pleasant than we originally thought.  We are glad that we are not here in high season though!