Lake in the Road

Sign: Lake ahead.

Sign: Flooded area ahead.

GPS: In a quarter mile, make a u-turn.

Bombay Beach

Bombay Beach was once a vacation destination community on the shores of California's Salton Sea. Today it is about a quarter square mile of abandoned ruins and occupied trailer homes.

Hamburg

Flooding in Hamburg, Illinois sends us on a detour through the town.

Grafton Detour

Grafton, Illinois sits at the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.  On the west end of Grafton we encountered flooding, and a detour.

The Graveyard

We encountered another flooded riverside park on the north end of Thebes, Illinois.

A sign at the park explained that the stretch of river passing by here was once known as "The Graveyard" due to the large number of steamboats that sank in this congested stretch of river with frequently changing depth. In was reported in 1867 that there were 133 sunken boats sitting on the bottom of the Mississippi between Cairo and Saint Louis.

On the day we visited it wasn't boats that ran aground. It was the river itself that had run aground -- consuming this park and other parts of the small river town of Thebes.