Day 4 - Pere Marquette Park to Waterloo, IL

We left Pere Marquette Lodge on a bike trail that took us all the way to Alton, IL; it was a short stone throw from the wide Illinois River for much of the way.  It follows the tall stone bluffs along the river, but in some places it sorely shows the neglect that comes from Illinois' buget crunch.  At times it seemed were doing mountain biking rather than trail riding.  In one of the rough stretches we met Recluse and Ice.  They are riding to New Orleans from Chicago self-supported.  The previous night they had slept in the front yard of a nearby small town mayor, the second mayor they had met.  Since starting their trip a couple of weeks earlier they had bathed only in the Illinois River.  They were enthusiastic and seemed like nice kids and were very eager to share their experiences.  Through much of the Alton and East St Louis area we were on levee trails.  We stopped at the Lewis and Clark Museum and enjoyed a very good learning experience along the Confluence Trail.  To play it safe, we rode the van from Granite City to Cahokia.  There we followed some roads, like Bluff and Levee, that seemed rather choked with traffic and lots of trucks.  Eventually they led us out across the bottoms to calmer and calmer areas, and finally to Vallmeyer.  What a place!  Before the flood of 1993 it was a town of about 800 and now there are only a couple of homes.  The river is not at all visible nor are any signs of it, but the gentleman we talked to said he had 9.5 feet of water in his 10 ft ceilinged rooms.  The town was moved to a nearby bluff.  Ken, Bill an Tom rode vigorously (Tom's opinion) from Cahokia, and then rode the 12 bonus miles to Waterloo, IL up on the bluff for a total of 78 miles.   Here are Ice (always icing his sore knee) and Recluse (thought he had a Brown Recluse spider bite and appear to actually have one) in front of the Piasa bird.

Along the Illinois River Bluffs - Grafton to Alton

Beautiful bluffs near Vallmeyer - the bluff we rode up!