Tuesday May 23, 2023 - Yankton SD to Backbone State Park IA

First big travel day so no big exciting pictures. We stopped in Yankton to get breakfast at the Fryn’ Pan diner. The waitress, Amy, was perfect (except she did not call us “darlin” or “hon”, but other than that it was eggs, bacon, pancakes, coffee.

We stopped at the Sergeant Floyd River Museum Visitor Center because Deb is addicted to road maps. Floyd was the only person on the Lewis & Clark expedition to die, and they think it was appendicitis, and he died in this location. Back in 1804, they could do nothing about appendicitis. The boat is all fixed up as a museum and they did a pretty good job. Three floors of history. Good stop.

Then it was pretty much driving the rest of the day. Deb is on a quest to stay at state parks, and she found Backbone State Park in Iowa that was on our route, so here we are tonight away from the corn fields, tucked into a rolling little geological place called the Backbone with a CCC built reservoir and stone buildings. We walked a good ways around the lake and back. A tree fell over just as we were walking by it, pretty weird. Saw some geese, chipmunks, wildflowers, and all kinds of new green growth. Everything is that pretty light green. The campground host was pretty informative (unlike the really young guy driving around in the pickup). The bugs were out and it was pretty warm and a little humid.

Dinner in the van (rice, steak strips, broccoli). Coconut cream pie (Amy talked me into a piece to go) then we left all the screened windows (2 sides and the MaxAirs) open since it was a bit warm. We have a small rechargeable fan (thanks to Hannah for the idea) which kept a little air moving. It was 76 degrees inside the van when we went to bed and 65 when we woke up.

Odo = 9226