A Very Long Drive...Avoka, Iowa to St. Louis, Missouri...

Friday, August 7, we left Avoka, Iowa. We had two Church History sites we wanted see in Iowa. As we drove we passed a rest area and their decoration was the arm of one of the big white windmills.

Our first Church History site was Mt. Pisgah. Let me just state that both of these sites were down gravel roads. Definitely both on the roads less traveled. Mt. Pisgah was one of three temporary way stations that the Latter-day Saints established across Iowa. Illness was rampant due to the weather and poor conditions. Many are buried at this site. It was abandoned in 1852 when the Saints were all asked to gather to Utah.

Time to find the next long gravel road to get to Garden Grove. 144 miles from Nauvoo, Garden Grove was the first permanent settlement on Potawatami Indian lands in Iowa. 

Cabins were built here. The nice things about this site is the grass was left long where the outline of the cabin walls would have been. Cabins had no windows. The only opening would have been the doorway. That is shown by there not being tall grass at that spot. There are four cabin outlines in the area. 

Down the hill is another cemetery. 

The trip is drawing to a close. From Garden Grove we aimed the hermetically sealed Buick toward St. Louis, Missouri. Windmills to generate electricity seemed to be a theme of this trip. We saw very long trucks carrying the arms of future windmills. We also saw another place with several arms of windmills waiting to be put together with their bases. Lots of windmills this trip.

One of the humorous things to Claude and me was the naming of highways in Missouri. They simply use the alphabet. When they have run out of letters, they just double the letter like Hwy. EE. The one that sent us into peels of laughter was this:
              OO
      Next Right

We figured we could get to St. Louis in time to have dinner at Zia's on the Hill. This place has the best salad and house dressing in the world. At least all of the world I have visited and eaten salad in. We did make it to St. Louis and we did find Zia's. We ordered two large Sicilian salads with house dressing for curbside pickup. 

Now, where to eat these salads. The Hill is an older Italian section of St. Louis. Lots of restaurants and cafes in older homes and there is no parking. I checked Google Maps and found a local park not far away. We circled the block the park was on and found a tree to park under. We totally enjoyed these salads. I sent a text to our friends that introduced us to this amazing restaurant to thank them again for sharing this spot with us. In the park was a statue of some citizen. Claude thought it looked like Yogi Berra which would have made sense as he was born in the Hill in St. Louis. After we finished eating, Claude took our trash to a trash can in the park and took this picture of the statue. It turned out to be Louis G. Midge Berra. Turns out the park was named after him and he is not a relative of Yogi Berra. 

Now time to find a hotel. We determined we wanted to drive a little out the other side of St. Louis so getting on the road the next morning would avoid rush hour traffic. As we crossed got closer to the Mississippi River we looked for the Arch. Yeah, we found it.

On the other side of the Mississippi we found a great Holiday Inn quite happy to welcome us for the night.