On Saturday, we decided we were in the mood to do something. We made a whole day of it. We got up early and headed west. The place in Marengo where we planned on eating breakfast was closed, so we ended up at McDonald’s with everybody else in Marengo.
We arrived in Dubuque around 9:30, and spent the rest of the morning in the museum. It’s an eclectic place with displays on the river and its ecology, on floods that occurred locally, on the history of steamboats and commerce and boat building and industry. In the main building there are tanks full of the sort of wildlife that can be found in the river. Upstairs, there are tanks of turtles from around the world. In another building there are more tanks with salt water fish that don’t seem to have any connection to any river. There’s a Hall of Fame of people who are connected to the American rivers in some way. There’s just s little bit of everything. It’s all done well, and much of it is interesting.
Fish found in the Mississippi.
They also had an alligator and a tank of salt-water fish, supposedly because the river empties into the ocean. A Moray Eel was swimming about in the open and looking odd.
Steamboat history.
The photo on the right is of a diorama of the shipyard in Dubuque. The long, low brown building in the corner is the building I was standing in when I took this photo.
Mark Twain’s mirror and a transom glass from a steamboat.
A clam boat and a pleasure boat and buttons made from fresh-water clam shells. The clams weren’t good for anything else.
Here I’m learning what it would be like to live in a shell like a turtle. A turtle with a camera.
The National Rivers Hall of Fame.
This was kinda fun. You could push a button on this table and reproduce in miniature the flood that swamped Dubuque in 1965.
There was stuff outside too, like this old towboat.
And these engines that looked like googly eyes.
As soon as I put the chair in front of the Otter tank, one came over to investigate.
I don’t know if we learned a great deal, but we had fun just being away and looking at stuff.