The Missouri

The mighty Missouri has exceeded her bounds and is lying right in our path. Water is covering roads, bridges are out and fields full of corn are submerged. It is an amazing, humbling and devastating sight. There is so much water and even more sandbags. Every town we go through has sandbags stacked along it streets and up against all the stores. People are evacuating as their fields lie under the river and the water continues to rise, approaching their homes.

We first heard about the flood from a fellow RVer at Carthage Jail. He just mentioned the detours he had to take to avoid the Missouri. So we got online and started looking. Much of our route, Highway 29, is closed. With the help of the internet and a couple senior missionaries we have thus far been able to avoid closed roads. We have seen a lot of county side from little two lane roads. In some ways it has been nice to see the farms and tiny Midwest towns up close. Fields of corn as far as the eye can see is a sight everyone should see. But obviously we aren’t making very good time and our RV doesn’t fit as well on a two land road as it does on a divided highway. At one point we were told to take the old Lincoln highway as a detour. The man who suggested it told us it might be a tight squeeze for us to get through a tunnel with our RV, but if he said if we couldn’t make it through the tunnel to just keep going another 15 minutes and there would be a slightly bigger one. So we get to the tunnel, 11’ 1” the sign said. We have never measured our RV but I had looked up RV specs on the internet and for models similar to ours the heights ranged between 10’3” and 11’3”. So we were a little nervous. Rick wanted to try it. I didn’t. Luckily looking out at the road we could see water covering it just a few hundred feet past the tunnel so we kept going. The next bridge had a clearance of 12’3”. We were more comfortable with that but we still did pull over and I jumped out ran ahead and watched as Rick inched through to make sure he wasn’t going to rip the AC off. We had plenty of room. We got a lot of stares and honks as cars whizzed by watching us crawl under the bridge but we made it fine.

We camped a little earlier than planned, we were exhausted and weren’t sure where the next place we could camp was. There was state park, Browns Lake State Park, right off the road so we decided to try it. We were hoping it wasn’t flooded but figured we could always just keep going if it was. Everything was open so we pulled in and camped. The place was swarming with mosquitoes and friendly campers. We had 2 men come over and meet us and offered to help us if needed. The electricity is great, the water is murky and the bathrooms are dirty. But since the only thing our RV doesn’t have is electricity it worked out just fine.