This is an especially large towboat I passed early this morning.
My guidebook said this is an area where lots of fossils can be found.....and sure enough, the first people I saw today were two guys looking along the river for fossils. I talked to them for several minutes. They said they prefer to call themselves "rock-hounds", since they look for rocks also.
Limestone is quarried around this part of Indiana; not the kind used for building, like in Bedford, but the kind ground up to be used on driveways and parking lots. In this photo you can see the quarry in the background, the area where it is ground and the barges as it's being loaded. You can see how low the barge is on the right, compared to the one in the middle. The middle one is low in the water where the gravel is and sitting high where there is no gravel. The barges sink down about nine feet when fully loaded.
I thought a fishing tournament might be taking place and found out from this guy that one was and he was taking part. I talked to him for a while and found out one of the things on his "bucket list" is that he wants to launch his boat in Cincinnati and ride it back to his home here. I found out later that his name is Benny,
I stopped in New Amsterdam, the smallest town in Indiana. This is the picnic shelter at their boat launch ramp with a sign indicating they are at mile 656.
This is the launch ramp.
At the picnic shelter I talked to a man and woman for a while. They told me I could get breakfast at the general store.
Under the glass covering the table, I saw several photos of the guy I talked to on the river. The women in the store are the ones that told me his name is Benny. They knew all about his bucket-list idea.
This is the inside of the general store. I talked to the Stephanie about getting breakfast. She told me what I could get, so she turned on an electric skillet like most people have in their kitchen and made me a bacon and egg sandwich. While eating, I asked Stephanie how New Amsterdam got the designation as the smallest town in Indiana. She said one time when the census was taken, an older woman in town was the only person to send in her form with her address listed as New Amsterdam. Actually they don't have a post office, so no one should have put down New Amsterdam. There are twenty-two people living in town, but when the census data came out, New Amsterdam was listed as having a population of one. When the town looked into getting it changed, it was going to cost so much they just forgot about it. But now they like the designation and actually have a festival every April with a couple thousand people coming to town.
This busy downtown New Amsterdam. That's a bait shop down on the right. With the fishing tournament, there were probably twenty-five trucks and boats parked between the bait shop and picnic shelter.
You probably can't see it without clicking for a larger version of this photo, but there are seven boats backed up to each other, forming a circle. This reminded me of one of my favorite country music videos, Redneck Yacht Club.
With virtually nothing but mud on both banks, it was getting late and I still didn't have a place to camp. Then I saw this stretch of rocks along the river.
The bad thing about camping on the outside of a curve in the river, is the waves being thrown up by the barges as they pass. With rocks, my kayak would get beaten up with the rocking of the waves. However, this was a multilayer section of rocks, so I just pulled the kayak all the way up onto this ledge. You can't see it, but the rocks formed a perfect set of stairs in the water, all the way to where I camped.
My tent was hidden from the river by these shrubs. The rope leads down to the kayak. This was a perfect spot to camp.
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