We left Grafton at 7 this morning, just as the sun was coming up.

Passing by the Grafton marina this morning, our port for the past 4 nights

     

Not exactly the white cliffs of Dover, but still interesting rock cliffs – there’s a highway between the cliffs and the river! And beautiful houses on the top of the cliffs

This is a riverboat casino in Alton IL – not very attractive. The bridge was much more interesting.

We passed several tows today that were 4-5 stories high – the pushing power of these is tremendous!

And of course there was lots of industry on both shores. We’re not sure what they were loading into these barges, but I don’t think it was health food. I can’t help wondering what the stuff blowing off does to the river waters. And then there was this old power plant.

We can see the arch!

    

We passed under 7 bridges in the St. Louis area – here are some of them.

Of course you can’t go through St. Louis without passing a Budweiser plant 😀🍺

We were pleasantly surprised by how little moving boat traffic there was on the river. There were a lot of barges anchored in the middle of the river but not many moving. It made traveling down the river much easier.

We arrived at Hoppies about 1:15, got fuel, and tied up to an old barge. Hoppies is known to Loopers for several things – it’s the last stop for fuel for the next 220 miles, it consists of old barges that are anchored to the shore by heavy cables attached to a couple of old trucks, and every day Fern, and now her daughter, give a briefing to Loopers on what to expect from here to Green Turtle Bay on Lake Barkley in Kentucky. Here’s a photo of one of the trucks that keep the barges anchored to shore – I think it looks just like Mater from Cars.

to be continued – I can’t get the rest of the photos to transfer from my iPhone to my iPad