What a day! We started out with breakfast at the local Cherokee casino which was open early and served cheap and tasty food. No complaints there. We headed next to the grocery store to get supplies for our afternoon adventure on the Illinois river. Peanut butter? Check. Water bottles? Check. Sandals? Check. Ok, then we were ready to go. We headed up to Sparrow Hawk Camp where we rented kayaks and were on the river before 11am. The river, by all accounts, was slow and lazy and people wished us a "good float" down and mentioned nothing about needing to paddle, steer, or keep our kayaks upright. Needless to say, the floating wasn't only floating. About twenty minutes in, we fought our first battle with the river and both took on so much water we had to beach our kayaks and flip them over to drain them. In the first battle, we managed to hold onto both kayaks, both paddles, and the peanut butter but only one water bottle and, sigh, only one of my sandals. Over the next three hours or so we alternated between legitimate, lovely, and lazy floating down river and paddling like maniacs against the high wind that came up periodically and pushed up upriver. Much more of an adventure than we'd bargained for, but a great afternoon nonetheless, and who needs two sandals anyway?
Tomorrow its back to work at an archive in Arkansas and then we are only on the road through the end of the week -- its the home stretch!
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