Day 22 - 2013

I slept very well last night. There was no one around and no lights anywhere. I woke up at 5:00 feeling rested, so I went ahead and got up. I was on the river by 7:05. I began a couple of miles past the town of Magnet, Indiana.




After an hour of traveling, I came to the town of Derby landing.




Derby is very welcoming of people on the river. This is their public boat dock.




This is my kayak tied up to the dock with part of their community park in the background. It was just a one block walk to the general store.




This was a sign at the park. They also have restroom facilities, which came in handy. At the store,the girl working there made me a turkey and cheese sandwich. Either I was awful hungry, or that was one of the best sandwiches I've had. I saw that she had a laptop computer behind the counter, so I gave her one of my cards and she said she would follow me online.




I took this photo for one of my fellow teachers at Princeton High School, Tracy Whitaker. We're both interested in the tiny house movement, which is something kind of new and unusual. Here is a tiny house on the Ohio River, that's smaller than the family's picnic shelter.

This is a little video I made. Let's see if it works for you.




I thought this bear looked cool, along with the "pimped-out" golf cart.




Around this time I had just traveled slowly during about an hour of rain. With two umbrellas, I stayed pretty dry and listened to most of the Prairie Home Companion show on the radio. This photo is of one of the old lock houses. These are very well built building at the site of old locks. Today they're used as community buildings, have been converted to residences, or in some cases, they've been abandoned.




A passing Coast Guard boat.




The town of Cloverport. It looked like a place I would have enjoyed stopping at, but I was on a mission. There was bad weather predicted for later today and I wanted to make it through the Cannelton Lock before it happened.







Whoops! Somebody's boat.




I was across the river form this, but you can see a lighthouse someone built onto their home.




I made it through the Cannelton Lock just in time. The sky in this photo is blue, but right after I locked through dark clouds started coming my way.

Above a dam/lock, there is virtually nowhere to camp. Immediately past a dam, there is always a sandy or gravelly beach opposite the locks. I went to that side and quickly found a clear spot. I sat up my tent in record time.....about ten minutes. Then I thew everything I needed in the tent. No sooner did I get that done, than the rain came pouring down. Since there was no lightening, I took advantage of the situation and took a shower and washed my hair in the rain. I then put on my new Derby General Store T-shirt I bought today and took this photo when the rain stopped.

Day 21 - 2013

This blog for Saturday, June 8th, is being uploaded one day late. This is due to the lack of a data signal where I camped out.





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.