Passing by the arch.

Barb's half Norwegian, so her skin has rarely seen sun. In spite of loads of sunblock and other cover-up measures, she suffered some bad sunburn, sun rashes, hives and blisters. But eventually she got quite tan.

Another wonderful campsite. I seem to talk about campsites a lot. But that was the real highlight of this trip. The camping is fantastic, even more so the further south we got. The low water helped, as there was much exposed sand on the inner banks and between the jetties. We were never far from a picture perfect spot to have dinner and watch the sunset.

We met a number of interesting people along the river. Julian Wedgwood, 70, from England was the most interesting. He was canoeing from the far headwaters of the Missouri River all the way to New Orleans, about 3500 miles! We first saw him near St. Louis doing some repairs to his hull that he suffered tumbling through serious rapids in Montana. Several days later he passed us (here). We then caught up to him at the marina in Memphis, and then he passed us for the last time. He was in the throes of Katrina when he managed to go back upstream with his motor to Baton Rouge and make his way home. We were sure happy to hear that he made it out of there safe.

And the camping just gets better! Here we're on the Kentucky side of the river.

Someone once asked Barb what she thought about all day long as she kayaked. "Cold drinks," she replied! Once we left the relatively easy access to civilization afforded on the upper river, we had no means to get ice for our cooler. So we baked in the heat, and forced hydration upon ourselves with warm water and warm flat pop. So in a rare accessible town such as New Madrid, Missouri, we took full advantage of that quintessential amenity of the civilized world—ice.

1000 miles! 37 days. Human powered.

On the lower Mississippi there are some treacherous stretches where the low water is forced around sandbars that have emerged. Here is one such stretch. It's hard to appreciate, but there are actually rapids and scary fast water in this area. We pedaled hard to stay out of the channel and the path of an oncoming barge when these nice Corps guys came over to see if we were all right. They were out mapping the area to see if they needed to get a dredger out here. Then they gave us some bottles of water. Even though we still had plenty of water from our last stop at Carruthersville, MO, we would never turn down an offer of cold beverages. This turned out to be a good practice, as the next several days we had many offers of cold beverages by curious boaters. Strangely, this never happened to us up north. It must be that southern hospitality!

And yet another visitor! This time, my brother Kent flew over from Houston to see us in Greenville, Mississippi. Oh, it was hot. It made his visit all the more enjoyable that we could stay in an air-conditioned motel with him! We also enjoyed a tasty but expensive meal at Doe's, the local hole-in-the-wall. We left our kayaks and much of our gear on the muddy bank by a city park for the night. We decided to just trust in the goodness of people to not mess with our stuff, and we never had any issues in any of the towns where we stayed.

Huck Finn. I believe that's requisite reading on a float down the river. We're now to Louisiana, feeling like we're on the home stretch, and confident we will make it the whole way to New Orleans. We now spend a lot of time talking about what we will do when we get there, where we will celebrate, where we will stay, how we will get the kayaks back home, etc.

And then Katrina came. Actually, this is the Sunday morning before Katrina came on Monday, sitting at our campsite. We had a marine radio with weather channels, so we were hearing about the gathering storm for a couple days, but I was not quite ready to believe it was really going to come our way. We were also getting cell phone calls from Barb's and my folks. The first couple calls were informational, but by Sunday morning, the calls were more alarmist, with pleas for us to get off the river ASAP. So by this time, we had surrendered to the inevitable on this glorious sunny day. The storm was coming, and it was deadly. We had to get out of here, but how? There's no houses, no towns, no roads, no nothing on this lower river. It's an isolated no-man's-land down here. Well, that's where this barge comes in. We noticed that it had passed us about fifteen minutes earlier, on its way upstream. Then it stopped. Then it backed up downriver until it was next to us. The captain came out and flagged us to come out on the river to talk to him. This is not your everyday behavior for a barge! We showed him our marine radio and then communicated with him on that. He also pleaded with us to not continue on. We asked him about possible places for us to pull out, including our idea of going to a ferry crossing that was 5 miles downstream according to our maps. Fortunately for us, he informed us that that ferry was not in service since the river was so low. But 1 mile upstream was the temporary location of that ferry. So that's where we headed. And not a moment too soon. This was the best decision that we'd made on this trip!

This is the east shore of the temporary ferry crossing. I thought this was going to be our pull out spot, and the end of our river trip. Not so. This turned out to be the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and the ferry was not a public ferry, but used exclusively by the prison. We pulled up to the sand and walked up the bank. A nervous security guard quickly confronted us, saying we were absolutely not allowed there, especially with boats! He said we could be arrested if his superiors saw us there. He did say that the west shore of the ferry crossing would be OK for us. And then he let his guard down some and asked us all kinds of questions about our trip. He was quite fascinated.

So then we crossed back over to the west side and squeezed our kayaks between the ferry barge and the steep rock shore. It was not an easy place to get out and unload, but we made the best of it, and the people working on this side of the ferry were incredibly nice and helpful. So we left all our stuff here, and were able to get a cab from Baton Rouge to drive the hour and a half to this spot and bring us to the airport. We got a rental car, which was incredibly fortunate, since the whole southern half of Louisiana was now fully in the process of evacuating. We stopped at the hardware store to get some things that would allow us to stack the kayaks on the rental car (don't tell them we did this to their car!) and went back to all our stuff by the prison, which took us three and a half hours because of the evacuation traffic. We managed to get our gear and kayaks loaded safely in and on the car and made our way home, just as the storm was coming in. After a few hours of driving, we got the last motel room in all of Louisiana.

This is Monday, the day Katrina hit the coast. By now we were in northern Louisiana, and just seeing the hurricane's outer fringes and some moderately strong winds. But my redundant ropes did the job, and we got the kayaks, the car, and us safely home!

And to close the circle, we stopped back at Hidden Falls. We were amazed at how skinny the river was here, and how skinny we were! I lost 15 pounds on the Kayak Diet!

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