Beardstown, IL


Again another calm pretty morning leaving Peoria and the IVY Club. Below is the Spirit of Peoria taking on passengers for a Saturday trip of 100 miles down the Illinois River.




The Spirit of Peoria is now underway and we will lock through with her.



We are traveling in another flotilla.


We are seeing more and more barge traffic but we hear they become even more numerous the further south you go. Yippee!!



I'm on Log Watch above. Apart from the barge traffic, the next most concerning issue is the debris in the water. After recent flooding last week, the rivers are clogged with logs, branches and other bad things just waiting to collide with your propeller.



Home sweet home for the night.  In Beardstown there is only one place to tie up for the night.  It is called Logsdon Tug Service.  It is a working barge outfit but they allow about 4 boats to tie up there when necessary.  We were boat #5 so we side tied to Misty Pearl and this is what they tied to below.


The picture below is deceiving, that's about a 25 foot climb up the stairs (after walking the length of two barges and jumping across both) to reach street level where we could "check-in" and actually pay money to be here (with no utility hook-ups!). 


You have to walk very carefully along the tugs to get to land. If you look in the middle of the pic below you can see our blue bimini top amongst the barges.



Can't believe Halloween is just around the corner.



We did take the short walk into town and had dinner at a local restaurant. Brent had the fried chicken again; said it reminded him of his Grandma's. But he ate it so quickly he forgot to take a picture of it.


A different angle of us tied to Misty Pearl.


That's the "office" below.


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