After another very windy night we left Buzzard Bluff in the rain and backtracked to US 60. At Van Buren, Missouri, we detoured down MO 103 to see Big Spring in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways. The spring gushes an unbelievable volume of clear turquoise water from a karst bluff and is constantly growing because it dissolves a vast quantity of limestone every day.
We returned to US 60 at Van Buren and headed east on the now mostly divided highway. As the hills flattened in eastern Missouri we passed large farms. When we turned onto the smaller US 62, the road was on top of the levee as we got closer to the Mississippi River. The wind continued to increase with leaf bombs smacking our windshield as we drove.
Our lunch stop was Fort Defiance Park at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. There were many barges going up and down the rivers and more were moored on either side of the confluence.
In Kentucky, we took KY 286 to Paducah and I24. Unlike eastern Missouri, this part of Kentucky was hilly with narrow winding roads. After just a few miles on I24 we headed for Land Between the Lakes on US 68. The bridge over the first lake was so narrow that we folded in the truck mirrors to drive over it. A new bridge was under construction and the campsite near it would have been very noisy so we continued to Turkey Bay OHV Area. The campsite amenities included an RV dump station, a potable water tap and porta potties with doors that banged all night in the wind and couldn’t be latched closed.
