June 17, 2012

We are in Illinois.  We left camp and followed scenic 79 along the Mississippi to Hannibal, Missouri.  This is where the boyhood home of Mark Twain is and where he got most of his inspiration for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  We walked through Mark Twain’s house and Huckleberry Finn’s house and then saw his father’s law office and Becky’s Thatcher’s house.  Afterward we visited the Mark Twain museum.

Then we drove to Nauvoo, Illinois and got an RV site at Nauvoo State Park.  We drove on the Great River Road between Hamilton and Nauvoo alongside the Mississippi River.  Our Casita in the picture is right next to the river.  Joseph Smith and the Mormons had a settlement in Nauvoo in the mid 1800s. There is a large Mormon temple here.  On the morning of June 24, 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother left their families for the last time from here.  They continued to Carthage, Illinois, where they faced legal charges and eventually death at the hands of a mob.  Jim’s great great grandfather settled in Nauvoo to work in vineyards that were here.  He and his brother had immigrated from Austria.

June 18, 2012

It is very windy today. We went to the Nauvoo Mormon land office and found Jim’s great uncle’s house (his great grandfather’s brother).  He lived in the Wilford Woodruff house after the exodus of the Mormons to Utah.  Wilford Woodruff was the fourth president of the Mormons.  We then drove to Carthage and saw the site where Joseph Smith was killed when he was in jail here.  At the Hancock County Historical Society Jim got some more information on his great grandfather and grandmother and found out where they were buried.  We drove to the cemetery and saw their headstone.

After coming back from the cemetery we went back to the Wilfred Woodruff house in Nauvoo and toured it.  We hooked up and drove across the state line to Iowa.  Iowa is one of three states I have not visited -- now I have only two states left.  We drove to Coralville just north of Iowa City and got a site at Sugar Bottom campground on Lake Coralville, an Army Corps of Engineers lake.  After unhooking we drove into Iowa City to Old Capital Brew Works and talked to the locals.  They gave us some really good information on sites to visit in the area.  Jim found Grant Wood's house and we drove by it. Grant Wood was a painter and one of his famous paintings was the iconic “American Gothic”.

 

June 19, 2012

Jim didn’t sleep much last night and he had chills.  Every time I rolled over and touched him he felt really hot to me.  When we got up, he told me he had a headache.  He didn’t want to hang around camp and rest so we went to Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. The Park Service has preserved the little village where Hoover lived as a youth. We saw the two-room house where he was born.  Beside it is his presidential library and the graves of him and his wife.  We went through the library and saw a movie then walked to the gravesite.

Jim wanted to go to Cedar Rapids and visit the Museum of Fine Arts to see some Grant Woods paintings.  On the way we stopped and bought a thermometer and Jim’s temperature is ok.  We walked through the museum’s two floors and saw all the art. We drove to 3^rd Base Brewing and had a beer.  The brewer talked to us and gave us small glasses of another brewery’s beer.  When we got back home, Jim lay down and I sat outside and read.  There are some army men in camp working on some of the sites.  This is the first time we have seen army men actually working at camp in an Army Corps of Engineers campground.  In an hour I went in to see if he was OK.  I took his temperature and it was 99.8 degrees.  He took a couple of aspirins and came outside and sat.  I fixed dinner and we watched some TV.  Jim’s temperature was 100.2 degrees at 8:30 pm and it was101.5 degrees when we went to bed.

June 20, 2012

When we got up he still had a headache and a fever.  We are going to the VA hospital in Iowa City this morning.  We are in a site that has people coming in tomorrow and if they decide to keep him in the hospital, I can’t move the Casita by myself.  We hooked up and moved the Casita to a first come, first served site.  We got set up and by 9 am were headed to the VA.  We told the doctor about his symptoms and then about the ticks and they are going to treat him as if that were the problem until the blood work comes back.  They are running six tests.  One is for Lyme Disease and one for Ehrlichiosis.   Ehrlichiosis is the tick disease the doctors think he has.  It is treated with the antibiotic Doxycycline.  He got a prescription for that and they drew blood and we went back to the Casita.

All afternoon Jim was in bed because of the headache. I checked his temperature a couple of times and he still has a fever.  I sat outside and read.  He got up before dinner and sat about an hour and then ate.  He went back to bed and I watched TV.   He still had a headache and fever when he took his medicine at 11 pm.  The doctor said it would be a couple of days before he started feeling better.  We will probably stay here two or three more days.

June 21, 2012

When we got up this morning Jim still had a headache.  His temperature was 99.2 degrees.  So, at least that is going down.  It rained during the night and it is much cooler today.  It got about 84 degrees.  We haven’t had the air conditioner on at all today.  I got our clothes, kitchen and bath towels and our sheets and went to the laundry mat.  Jim was laying down when I left and I asked our neighbors to listen for him if he needed anything, they said they would keep an eye out.  When I got back Jim was outside and he stayed up for a while then went back to lie down.  He said he thought he was feeling a little better today.  But still had the headache.  I sat outside and read.  When I got ready to fix dinner at 6 pm, Jim got up again.  His temperature is still 99.1 degrees.  About 9 pm we went inside to watch some TV and he took another Ibuprofen.  Hopefully tomorrow he will feel even better.   Sorry, no pictures today. 

June 22, 2012

Jim doesn’t have a fever this morning and his headache is much better.  We drove to the Amana Colonies through the countryside. There were really pretty farms and lots of cornfields. The Amana Colonies are a group of villages that were started by the Amanians, radical German Pietists.  They had communal living, no private ownership.  We went to a few of the historical buildings still in use since the 1850’s.  Similar to the Amish they were almost entirely self-sufficient.

 I had a beer at Millstream Brewing and Jim watched me drink it.  He can’t have one till he takes all of his antibiotics. We went to the woolen mill, the furniture store and the meat shop and smokehouse.  All of these were still in operation.  We bought some cheese and sausage for lunch with crackers and honey mustard I had in the Silverado.  We also stopped at a cemetery to see the way they bury their people.  They are buried by the date they die, in order.  The oldest headstone was 9-14-1864 and the newest was 1-27-2012.  All headstones are alike -- plain and simple. We also got to sit in Iowa’s largest rocker.

 We drove back toward camp and found two geocaches in North Liberty.  Then we went to Lake McBride and saw a raptor exhibit and went to a bird blind.  There were owls, vultures, hawks, a golden eagle, and a bald eagle.  We found a geocache here also.  We found one more by a very long baseline array radio telescope (VLBA antenna).  There are ten of these spread around the US, one in St. Croix, New Hampshire, Iowa, Texas, New Mexico (2), Arizona, California, Washington and Hawaii.  They allow astronomers to make detailed studies of celestial objects.  Computers combine the data from all of these antennas to simulate a single antenna 5,000 miles wide.  The resulting images are very detailed – the array could resolve a football on the surface of the moon (if one was there).  The antenna weighs 260 tons and is 82 feet in diameter.  This geocache had a travel bug in it so we took it.  We will drop it off in another geocache. We went back to camp and had dinner.  The camp in totally full, noisy and smoky -- we hate weekends when we travel.  Jim is still ok tonight.  Maybe he will be ok from now on.

June 23, 2012

Jim is back to normal today.  He will still take his medicine for the next 7 days. We went to Walmart and got some groceries and a couple of other items.  Then we went to geocache a while.  We found four geocaches today, one of them was in the Walmart parking lot.  We went back to camp and Jim printed out an emailed mineral  and then we went back to town to a notary and fax service.  We sat outside at camp and looked through maps and books to see where to go tomorrow.  We will probably go through Dubuque and then to Potosi, Wisconsin.  Our friend Scott told us about a National Brewery Museum and we want to go to it