So after the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium visit, it was off to the Mines of Spain. We had little to no idea of what the Mines of Spain was really about so we also knew very little of what we were getting ourselves into.
We knew they had hiking trails, and lots of them, and we knew it was nearly 100 degrees.
So, lets go hiking!
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| One of the first sights that you see once you've gone up and over the first hill (it was mildly difficult!) was this! You can't argue with this. That tiny bit of light-blue'ish color just to the right of center is the Mississippi River way off in the distance. |
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| Similar view. |
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| Similar view again but we're about an additional 20 yards down the path from the last one and now we can see trails way down below us. We have to figure out how to get to those! |
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| We're closer to finding a way down and the bluffs were quite beautiful! |
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| This is me standing about as close to the edge as I could get myself and looking mostly straight down. The tops of the trees were 30 - 40 ft below us... |
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| Ah, somebody was kind enough and thoughtful enough to build steps for us! That's the boys and Mama on the steps. Mama is about halfway down... maybe. |
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| Now we're down... |
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| This was stunning. What else was stunning was how long we hiked next to these beauties! |
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| Some backwater with a chorus of toads singing. This was also the last picture I took on this hike as the rest was pretty much just forest on the way back to the parking lot. Turns out we hiked a big loop. |
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| The Mississippi again. Hard to tell in a small picture like this, but the hwy 20 bridge from Dubuque, IA to East Dubuque, IL is visible and if you really knew where to look, you could spot the river museum that we were at previously. This is at the Julian Dubuque Memorial Monument. |
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| Memorial for Chief Peosta. The stone reads, "Chief of the Mesquakie and friend of Julian Dubuque". |
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| The monument itself! |
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| I'm sorry... I love pictures of the river from the surrounding bluffs. |
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| Quite the grave marker, if I don't say so myself! |
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| This was the start of another hike within the Mines of Spain. I can't recall which trail it was tho... We were alongside this creek for some time. I think, after looking at the map, it may be catfish creek, but I'm not sure. |
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| I like funky trees! This hike was REALLY, REALLY long and was mostly forest so this is the last picture since this post is getting a little long in the proverbial tooth. |
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| So after a failed visit to 7 Hills Brewery and a somewhat successful trip to Dimensional Brewing and slightly less successful trip to some restaurant with pretty horrible service, we made it back to the camp ground to find out that everything had been rained on. But we had a fire anyway, and a pretty dang good one too! I put fire sparkly colors crap on the fire. |
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| Playing with the fire-poking stick and my camera. |
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| More... |
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| No kidding, everybody else went to bed and I stayed out to watch the embers. I was also watching the moon behind the trees and when it finally lined up with the hole thru the trees, the coyotes began howling. Coincidence for sure, but a pretty cool coincidence none-the-less! |
That pretty well does it for day two. We'll have to wait a bit to see what day 3 brings. Thanks for reading my silliness.
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