Alton Marina, Alton IL

Greetings from the Alton Marina. We arrived here yesterday after passing the confluence of the mighty Mississippi River and the Illinois River. I took a picture for posterity, but it's not much to look at. The point is that we are now LOOPING. The Alton Marina (www.altonmarina.com) is very nice, we got the BOAT US discount so we decided to stay 2 nights. If you go to the web address, you can see an ariel shot of it and read about all the amenities. The first thing we did was clean the entire boat inside (took about 30 minutes) and showered. We met Joyce and Dennis (JoyDen is their boat) who have been living aboard and cruising since 1991. They've looped a couple of times. Last night we went to dinner with them at Fast Eddies, where, honest to gosh, hamburgers are 99 cents and french fries are 99 cents, and it's a half pound burger and good fries....dinner for 2 for less than $5. JoyDen is wintering here and next summer heading up the Mississippi to the head of navigation, so look for her in our neighborhood. She's a beautiful 37 foot trawler with lots of shiny varnished teak. Today Joyce took us to the grocery store with her and we stocked up. Also did ALL the laundry. When you are cruising, every day chores like laundry and groceries take up an entire day and become monumentally significant and satisfying. After all that work, we decided to have another dinner out and walked up to a local Italian spot, can't remember the name, ran into another cruising couple that we had met, and had delicious salad and pizza. They are from Minnetonka !

The plan tomorrow is to head for Hoppies, but big rain is expected, so we'll see. Hoppies is south of St. Louis and then there are no marinas for the next 228 miles. The Mississippi portion of the stretch is without any locks, so the current is commonly 5 mph and up. Then comes the Ohio River portion where you are heading upriver into heavy barge traffic, coming, going, sideways and sitting still. At Hoppies Marine, owner Fern Hopkins, gives a daily briefing to all loopers to guide us all safely through this stretch, and make anchoring recommendations to go along with all the recommendations in our guidebooks. We will be anchoring for 2 or 3 nights depending on how far we get each day. I've no idea when I'll be able to connect to the internet next, so just wanted to send out an update as we begin this pretty exciting part of the journey.