Cassville

kind of a fun place. We went camping at Governor Dodge State Park near Cassville (could be mixing my parks up here). Terrible mosquitoes. But while in Cassville, we stumbled across an airstrip that was putting on a pancake breakfast. So we pulled in and discovered a great piece of small town Americana. Even better, we discovered that turtles were on the way up from the river to the base of the bluff to lay their eggs. The airstrip was in between the river and the bluff. So the planes were frequently damaged and turtles killed when planes would land or take off and encounter a turtle on the runway as the plane tried to take off. So the airstip kept the kdis busy “patrolling” the side of the airstip watching for plane breaking turtles. Happily, we saw no turtles getting squished but we did see and hold a ton of big old snapping turtles. Kind of cool.

There is also an old fashioned car ferry you can take across the river here. We did this and landed on a gravel beach on the Iowa side. We toured up the IA side for a ways and discovered some surprisinly jaw dropping terrain overlooking the MS river. I’ll bet there are bluffs pushing a 1000 feet of relief on that side of the river.