This has been a good day not to ride. There were heavy rain storms through early afternoon, I was beginning to wonder whether I'd get a chance to walk around and explore.

I've pretty much done about as little as possible today, and the Ruebel is a good place to do it.

Wash clothing. Nap. Walk around the hotel & chat with people. Eat. Nap. The scrapes of yesterday are clean & mending. I was a little sore this morning but after being lazy and walking around some things seem fine.

When the sun came out around 3PM I fired the bike up and rode a mile or so down to the visitor's center at the edge of town, where everybody had pointed me for maps. I need to plan a route that gets me to southern Illinois without taking me through the ghettos of East St. Louis. Turns out Illinois has published a series of bicycle maps that rate roads in terms of bicycle friendliness. No guarantees, but I was able to get the goods in order to plan tomorrow's ride.

I've finally seen some commercial river traffic, I'm looking at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois here at Grafton, and several long barge trains have passed by today going down river.

Tomorrow I'll ride bike trails down to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi at Hartford, then head east then south toward Carbondale and the final leg home on the ACA trans Am route. Clearing weather and northwest winds forecast for tomorrow (that's good if you're going east and south).