Travelling the Great River Road

I have been on the road for the past two weeks.
When I was young, I met many delegates to the Mississippi Parkway through good friends of the family Kate and Bill Noden. They were my third set of grandparents.
For many years Fort Frances and this area promoted crossing the border and proceeding north to Dryden as an extension of the Great River Road.
My wife and I have always thought that travelling the Great River Road south to its outlet would be fascinating and this year we took on the road trip.
We began in Hastings, Minnesota, where the St. Croix River flows into the Mississippi. We then followed the Great River Road south, passing through many small communities strung out along the bottom of the river gorge. The first set of locks are found in Minneapolis and the final set of locks that permit barge river travel over 1,100 miles number 27 is found in Granite City, Illinois.
By the time the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans from its beginnings at Lake Itasca, it has dropped almost 1,500 feet.
One might not realize how busy the river traffic is along the Mississippi River, but there are constant streams of towboats and barges moving north and south. The boats moving north against the currant must give the right of way to boats moving south. Boats head north all the way to Minneapolis, and follow up the Ohio River to Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
One can travel up the Missouri River all the way to Kansas City. Some barge traffic can get as far north as Sioux Falls, Iowa.
Travelling along the bottom of the bluffs along the Great River Road, one can only marvel how this great river has ground its way down through limestone juts out in the bluffs. Just riding up out of the river to the bluffs can seem like climbing 500 feet and reaching the top of the bluffs one looks out on miles and miles of corn and soy beans through southern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and even into northern Arkansas.
Once into the southern states, you see the huge work that the US Army Corps of Engineers has done to build giant levies to hold back flooding. They are huge and protect farmland, and major cities against flooding as the Mississippi can leap in height.
The crops change from corn to rice, cotton sorghum, and soybeans through the southern states. In Louisiana, you also will see sugar cane being grown. Travelling along the highways, crop seed signs are posted but you have to research what you saw on the highway by going back to the internet.
Large signs saying Rice or Sorghum or Sugar Cane would be a good addition for tourism.
The cotton was all out in bright white, and the harvesters were in the fields creating huge bales of cotton each the 2.5 m X 2.5 m. X 5m long were covered in the fields awaiting transport to the river for movement north and south.
Huge elevators for soy beans, corn, soy beans and other grains also were strategically placed to move those crops north or south by barge.
It was evident that the Mississippi is a lifeline for agriculture in the US.

–Jim Cumming,
Publisher