The travel dilemma
You may remember I stayed here overnight a couple of weeks ago - this is Superman's hometown, remember? - and thought it was very comfortable. I was also quite pleased to find I was picking up a wifi signal, which is the main reason I came back. My plan was to stay here the rest of the month, get caught up on my blog and ready for my next state, but "the rest of the month" part isn't happening.
Turned out I couldn't get a reservation for the night of September 30th because the entire campground is booked. (More on that shortly.)
Unfortunately I hadn't known this when I made a reservation for Lily at the Banfield in Louisville at 1:30 on October 1st, and reservations for all of us at the nearby KOA beginning then. I had a surprisingly hard time getting that vet appointment and didn't want to try to reschedule.
Louisville is a 3-hour drive from here for people who go 70 mph on the interstates, but I go no more than 65 mph, which of course makes the drive longer than 3 hours. Plus, I take several rest breaks with one usually including lunch, which also add time onto the drive. All of that meaning I'd have to leave really early to make it to the Banfield halfway across Kentucky by 1:30 even from here.
There are no campgrounds in Illinois nearer than 30 backroad miles from here, which would add a whole lot onto the already long drive.
In other words, I had no good options.
I thought long and hard about this self-imposed rule of mine to spend the entire month inside each state, and decided this was the time I needed to break that rule. So, sadly, I'll be leaving Illinois on the 30th, rather than on the 1st, and going to the Louisville KOA a day early.
The Encampment
The reason for all this inability to stay at the state park is something I'd never have foreseen. In mid-October the park will host its 26th annual Encampment, which is a 2-day event that commemorates the battle held here. The park ranger told me they expect about 200,000 people to attend. Yes, that's Two Hundred Thousand. Crammed into this tiny town and this tiny state park.
Beginning October 1st, the park makes all its campground spaces first-come-first-served. This means for those who want a campsite (with electric hookup) they have to reserve a site for September 30th, in order to be actually in the site when October 1st rolls around, thus becoming the first come to claim it. People apparently made reservations ages ago, which is why the entire campground is booked for that night.
The interesting part to the park ranger is that squatting in a campsite means you have to pay for it in advance or somebody else could slip in instead. So folks are paying $20 for every night from at least September 30th (some are already here) until after October 20th, when the Encampment is over. The ranger said some folks make this Encampment their annual vacation trip.
The ranger also noted that quite a few of those paying for 3 weeks of camp site actually live in Metropolis. Apparently they want to be even closer to the action than they already are - and it is, after all, their home town and their local shindig. I figure it's a little like tailgating at football games - you can sit at home and eat and then go to the game, or you can go early and be in the middle of the excitement.
To deal with the mob, the state park creates non-electric camping spaces in all kinds of places where now there's just parkland. And help is brought in from state parks all over the state, as well as from the central DNR office, because they're responsible for everything. Though these days they get help from groups such as Friends of Fort Massac, but still. 200,000 people?
http://metropolistourism.com/encampment/ This is a local link with more information about the event. The ranger told me the only vendors that are allowed are those that fit in historically - no funnel cakes, for instance. They have a special day for school kids the day before the official start of the Encampment, and kids get bused in not just from Illinois schools but from other states as well. I'll have to keep this in mind because I would likely not be able to find a camping spot in this part of Kentucky at that time.
Farming in Illinois
I talked to someone who grew up in a farming family from Iowa and Illinois and knows a lot more than I had time to learn about farming here.
She confirmed what I'd heard - that most people living in Chicago think almost anywhere south of the suburbs is in southern Illinois. She learned this when she told people she lived in the Springfield area and they said oh yes, southern Illinois - when, in fact, Springfield is almost in the smack dab center of the state.
She told me that before white people arrived, most of Illinois was wet prairie and had been for centuries. As the prairie grass would grow and die each year, it would add another layer of mulch to the increasingly fertile soil. By the time white settlers arrived, the soil had become black with rich decayed mulch and is still an extremely fertile place.
And I was right in thinking that what they mostly grow here are corn and soybeans. I was also right in thinking that farmers are currently very worried indeed about their economic future, thanks in part to the trade war.
She said few people realize that the relief money the administration is sending to farmers is more than double the amount of the auto industry bailout approved by Obama during the recession; she thought it odd that people are still - years later - upset about that bailout but haven't said a word about double that amount going to farmers. I certainly haven't seen any publicity about it. Presumably, the few who happen to have noticed think it's different for mom-and-pop farmers than for fat-cat auto execs, without thinking about agri-business, or about the auto assembly-line workers.
She said that, despite the trade war, farmers had planted their crops when the rains stopped a few months ago because they had a deadline of June 2 (I think she said), and if they didn't have their seeds actually in the ground by then, they wouldn't be able to get crop insurance. Insurance problems on top of everything else hadn't occurred to me.
I told her I'd been hearing reports on farm futures and was surprised to hear prices on "lean hogs," because is the opposite "fat hogs?" She said actually lean hogs were a result of the 1970s push to reduce animal fat in our diets. That was the time when folks believed we should remove all fat from our meats (which I refused to do because it adds so much to the flavor). So hogs were gradually bred to produce meat with less fat in it, which is what we have now.
She herself thought the real dietary culprit was and is sugar and talked a bit about the politics around reducing sugar consumption nationally, but my brain started to get a bit overloaded at that point because I couldn't take notes and had to remember everything (I was walking the dogs at the time).
I wish I'd met her earlier and that I had time to ask her more questions, because I've just been traveling through 5 agricultural states (Ohio through to Illinois) and will meet many more next year, and I want to understand more about what I'm seeing and what life is like for the folks that live there.
Time in Metropolis and the campground
I saw someone with a t-shirt that read in large letters "That's Too Much Bacon" and in smaller letters "said nobody ever."
I spent a day getting things done: buying groceries, doing laundry, changing the sheets, taking out the trash, dumping the sewage tanks, getting a shower, cleaning the RV's windows. And walking the dogs in between tasks.
Metropolis has a flashy Harrah's Casino, located on the river at the very visible end of one of the main streets.
There was once a coat hanger factory in the building next door to the state park. Friends of Ft. Massac have bought the building and the land and have plans to convert it into a part of an historic village to go with the fort buildings on nearby state park land. Did you ever consider that there's a factory making coat hangers somewhere? I always assumed they multiplied themselves while hanging at the back of dark closets.
For most of the time I've been here, I've had trouble with my wifi reception. I'm getting it, and my gizmos are saying it's a good connection, but most of the time it's as slow as dial-up and is driving me crazy. A disappointment when I'd planned to spend so much time catching up on my blog.
I'd paid in advance to stay here until the 30th in campsite #5. As with all Illinois state parks, there's a notice at the campsite that says so, with my name on it. I left for several hours to run those errands and, when I got back, found the campground hosts had sold my site #5 to someone else.
When I talked to the hosts, they said we didn't know you were coming back, you should have left something at the site. I said I'd figured the notice saying I'd already paid for 2 more nights should have been notice enough. Then they said well, I'd just have to move to another site, but I already knew the only other sites available would have been difficult with the dog-walking and refused to move. And then I had to wait while the campground host and the guy in the other RV walked around the campground trying to find a space for the very large Class A he had. And finally the guy unplugged his electric cord, cranked in his slides, released his hydraulic stabilizers, and chugged on down the road, and I could get back into the site I'd already reserved and paid for.
But it took me a while to stop being peeved. If there were other campsites, why didn't those "hosts" put this guy in one of them in the first place? And why did I have to leave something to prove I was coming back (which we now know could easily have been stolen) when I'd already left a sign saying I'd paid $40 to stay there for the next 2 nights? And why did they think I should be the one to move when I'd already been staying there 2 nights and I'd already reserved in advance that specific site and that other person just came in without a reservation? And why were those "hosts" trying to make it seem like this was all my fault instead of theirs for being lazy - they must have just looked at my site (across the street from theirs) and seen that it was empty and not bothered to look for one that hadn't been reserved. This is the first time in all these many months and many campgrounds that I've run into this and I wish there were some way I could make the management realize those "hosts" aren't doing their image any good. But it'll be a long time before I come back this way, so I'll let it be someone else's decision.
In the meantime, I'd been afraid the campground would be completely jammed over this weekend because of people coming for the Encampment. Walking around with the dogs, it's looked to me like almost all the sites were reserved. But even on the weekend the campground has seemed not much more than half full, which is a relief to me. Much less noise from kids and other campers, fewer dogs.
There's a resident doe and the twins she bore this year. The young 'uns are half grown now, though they're still noticeably smaller than their mother. The three hang out together, but they seem to have almost no fear of humans or vehicles or even dogs which I find worrying. I've seen them all several times - at dawn, at dusk, in broad daylight. Feeding at vacant campsites and in a clearing near the dumpster and in the center of a camping loop. I wonder what they'll do when 200,000 people show up. These babies are not learning skills to help them cope with the real world and I'm afraid when they're on their own they'll get hit by a car or shot or mangled by a dog. But maybe mama will figure out a way they can all spend their lives somewhere here in the park. The living seems to be good for them here.
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