Day 5

Miles Covered: um 491- to um 455 (37 miles)

Closest towns or landmark (chart): Island outside of Lock 14 to Muscatine, Ia.

Original Post date: June 3, 2009

The day started with the usual morning cleanup and down the river we went. We may have been spoiled lately with the good breakfast’s that we’ve had most morning’s along the river. This morning was not the case because even though we were near a large town, we couldn’t find breakfast riverside – thought one place was open because a fire truck was in the lot, but it was Davenport’s FD doing a pre-incident plan. Nice folks, they walked out to the river wall where we talked a moment before shoving off…….we remained hungry.

Soon it was into the soft Oreo cookie’s. They’re a little soggy from the humidity and really pretty good that way – with a little milk!

Tom is finding that computer time is limited during the day, so we make little notes here and there. We seem to be writing on everything actually. The boat especially, has numerous notes, logs, etc.

Taking it all in seems to be the priority of the day, and also without the sunshine the past few days, the battery dedicated to our electrical inverter is running low – camera battery is down at this time too, please send the sun… today it was 66 cloudy with occasional rain – even so it all remains very awesome, fun, and entertaining as this new world passes by us.

We stopped to top-off our fuel and on the unattended shack the sign said “push the buzzer”. Well Tom did and it was like a FOG HORN just above his head. He jumped a mile and I laughed my ass off! That’s one thing I can say for sure about this journey, I have laughed and laughed. It’s good for the heart!

So Tom became “one with the river” again and we continued into Muscatine, Iowa – nice protected harbor, and then spent the day/night, roaming the neat little town..

During that time we visited the local pubs, The Pearl, the Hubble, and the Button Factory – seems years ago they made buttons from clam shells collected from the Mississippi – a lost business, now a restaurant, but the folks were interesting and the beverage made us feel a little more at home…

Say Cheese Tommy!

Let's Eat!

Thank goodness it was just Tuesday or I think we would still be out roaming the streets. The other boaters Tom, Holly, and Pat aboard the French Quarters were great conversation during the evening and later at their boat. The Dockside community is a neat little family.

We locked through lock 16 with the ‘French-Quarter’ – they are headed to the Gulf via the Tenn-Tom.

"French Quarters"



Ok, so a quick post and we’re headed to fiddle with the trigger on the coffee maker so that it will be ready in the morning…..