October 18 and 19 were travel days between St Louis and Memphis. This is over 300 miles on the Great River Road, too far for one day. So the tour adds a stop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to break it up.

We had an easy 2-hour trip to the Cape, as it’s called. There were lots of options of things to visit once we arrived. Unfortunately, we had a tire on the Jeep that kept losing air, so I spent my afternoon at a tire repair shop down the road from Cape Camping and RV Park, where we were staying. By the time that was over, there was only time left to have dinner, write a blog post, and get some sleep.

The next day we drove to Tom Sawyer’s RV Park in West Memphis, Arkansas. This is a large park with campsites all along the river for at least a tenth of a mile, maybe longer. Our tour group had sites together at one end of the park, many with river views.

As we traveled downriver on the tour we kept hearing reports of the record-breaking low water conditions on the Mississippi. Here, we can see very clearly what the drought has done to the river. The water is so low that commercial shipping is being severely impacted. The river is too narrow and too shallow for the barge traffic to operate as it needs to; in fact, in many cases it isn’t running at all. When we stopped at the Arkansas Welcome Center on the way into the state, the folks there told us that some of the soybeans that were shipped on the barges have been dumped on the ground at transport facilities in this area. The barges can’t take them any further and there is no place to store them here. It’s appalling to see all of this food going to waste!