Day 5: Council Bluffs IA - Chamberlain SD

 Mucho zagging and, moreover, zigging between states again today viz. Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota.  First to the Big Lake Park Scenic Overlook on the Iowa side of the river, which offers unparalleled views of, er,

Omaha airport.  To be fair there were some nifty bas-reliefs of Lewis, Clark et al meeting the Native Americans but the light was all wrong so they'd have been invisible.

Swift backtrack and across the river to Omaha NE, where poor Kate the TwatNav was mightily confused by bits of the road system being somewhere other than where she thought they should be.  We did the Riverfront part of Omaha in 2017 and I'd swear blind that none of the fancy Stuffs like the kiddiewinks' playground, the Urban Beach and the gigantic visitor center were there then.  But apparently they've been there 20 years.  So here instead is a picture of a gaily-coloured and nearby water tower:

Followed the Nebraska side of the river for the next Several of miles up to Fort Atkinson.  This didn't appear to have anything going for it that Fort Osage didn't do yesterday except these oddly-hued sqrls:

so I did not linger.  Unlike the sqrls.

"Did someone say 'squirrel'?"

Up the road apiece to Decatur and back across the river to Onawa, where the L&C Museum has a replica of the expedition's keelboat.

Why it's called a "keelboat" is a mystery since among the many things it lacks - 16-litre diesel engine, mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice ect & moreover, ect - is a keel.  Even without such an impediment the lowly serfs of the expedition spent much of the upstream trip bowhauling this eight-tonne contraption, plus a couple of smaller boats as the current in midstream was too strong for rowing.  The edges of the river were instead beset with hidden sandbars, half-submerged logs and mosquitoes.  When some of the Corps returned to St Louis from Fort Mandan ND in the spring of 1805 the 1500 mile trip back to St Louis took six weeks as opposed to five months going uphill.

Nearby was this amazeballs tree:

but not this:

unless they were hiding behind a tree or disguising themselves as sqrls.

Back to Nebraska for a bit followed by back to Iowa for a bit more, being the Sergeant Floyd Monument:

Sergeant Floyd was the only member of the Expedition to die utterly to DETH, in his case from "bilious colic".  Modern types translate this as "a ruptured appendix", which in them days was a DETH sentence.

The Big List of Places to Go originally had the 3 State Overlook and Spirit Mound in that order but last night someone indicated by means of arrows scrawled on the appropriate bit of paper that they should be swapped over.  A mistake that cost a lot of miles.  Anyway, Spirit Mound is near Vermillion SD and looks like this:

These days you can actually walk to the top, but it's a mile and a half round trip in 30+ Celsius temperatures with no shade or water, so I wimped out.  To prove this is not a stock photo half-inched off of Google here is a Mr Larrington standing next to the info board in the car park:

Pic taken by a fellow L&C Trailer from Georgia¹, in case you were wondering.  The navigational cockup meant travelling about twenty miles in the opposite direction and then back, though the views for the 3 State Overlook were worth the effort:

Ponca NE is also home to the first petril station this side of the pond where you fill your motor-car before paying the nice lady or the petril pump.  "We're traditionalists", she said.

"Still," thought Mr Larrington, "at least the route from here to I-90 will take me through Mitchell, the home of Dick's Body Shop so I can get a picture of his famous sign!"  Only problem being that in the last seven years someone has removed the middle panel of the billboard, which is supposed to look like this:

Bah!  If you're wondering why the sudden change of direction away from the Mighty Missouri the answer is that since 1806 a Several of dams have been built in the Dakotas and Montana meaning much of what Lewis and Clark saw will now be under water.  Gavins Point Dam near Yankton being the first and 

Fort Randall Dam the next; the latter backs up the river as Lake Francis Case, on which Chamberlain is situated.  So today, which was supposed to cover 330 miles actually saw 420 because roadworks meant the exit for downtown Chamberlain was closed to westbound traffic, meaning a trip across the bridge and a U-turn.  Natch they didn't mention this until after I'd passed the previous Chamberlain exit.  It also means the rest area is closed which in turned prevented a return visit to Dignity:

Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed
Dignity never been photographed

Bah!

1. Think Jimmy Carter, not Joseph Stalin