Grafton is a small town (pop: 650), but it has a huge personality. Named after the town of Grafton, Massachusetts - the town where the founder came from - it was built as a center of trade at the mouth of the Illinois River. Nowadays it is a vacation resort complete with more than a dozen restaurants and bars, vacation cottages and condos built going up the bluffs behind the riverfront town.

Pere Marquette State Park is about 6 miles down the road on a lovely bike trail. We rode out and had lunch at the Lodge in the Park - built in the 1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps - it has the soaring lobby reminiscent of the Grand Canyon Lodge and the fine log/timber structure that has withstood over 80 years of use. Along the bike trail to the Park is the site of the 1673 landing of Marquette and Joliet's expeditionary party and their first entry into Illinois. They had come down from the Great Lakes at Mackinaw (St. Ignace), Green Bay, the Wisconsin & Fox Rivers, and the Mississippi to this point and then went back up to Lake Michigan via the Illinois River - a different loop than ours. They had already at that point assumed that New Orleans lay at the end of the mighty Mississippi, marking the first time the French put all the pieces together of what their claim to New France encompassed. There were also legends of monsters in the Mississippi that consumed men and canoes whole - a huge warning mural depicting the Piasa bird monster on the Mississippi limestone cliffs is lost to history.

Other monsters still exist on this river as we were to soon find out. The Mississippi River we had heard was rising - this was evident in that part of the bike trail in downtown Grafton was under water at the shoreline (7/10 mile from the Mississippi and technically still the Illinois). We didn't think much of it, but heard that worse was yet to come - a thought we didn't worry too much about because the Illinois River was low, and everyone complained about how low it was this year - so how could the Mississippi be flooding?...

On our last night in Grafton, we ate at the Grafton Winery - which has great wine, for a wine-growing area I'd never been aware of. After dinner, on a lark and feeling full we climbed up the hill to a place called the Aerie. From there, where you could drink even more Illinois wine, you could see the broad snaky contours of the Mississippi coming from the northwest and going south. Tomorrow we would be entering the muddy waters of the Mississippi.