The Fourth in Keokuk!

My family has been in Keokuk, IA (north of St. Louis by Nauvoo) for most of this month. Mark, Laurel and I drove up there for the 4th of July and had a great time. Mark and I went back to a spot in Illinois where we went with our wedding photographer, and therefore, you might recognize it from some of our wedding pictures. Basically, it's just a dumping ground for old train cars, trucks, sand and gravel. By the way, gravel is kind of scary to climb around on.

With all the flooding last month, bridges all up and down the Mississippi were having to close to traffic. It was very important that the Keokuk bridge stay open because all the other nearby bridges were closing. I thought this was very clever. They stacked cement roadblocks two high on both sides of the IL bound lanes. Then they filled the whole thing with gravel and had traffic drive on top of the gravel. Basically, they built a road over the road. I tried to take a couple pictures from the car. You can kind of get an idea for what it looked like. When I took the pictures, they were in the process of taking it all down, so I was driving on the IA bound lanes, which were left clear so they wouldn't even have to close the bridge to put up or take down the gravel road.

Then we went to the Keosippi mall in Keokuk where "Joe Exotic" was letting people pay to spend time in cages with his baby tigers. Apparently, people buy exotic animals online as pets. Then when they get too big, and people don't know what to do with them, they get sent to shelters. Joe Exotic is just one of these shelters. They have a wonderful habitat for the animals (ligers, tigers, wolves, etc.). They take a few animals at a time on the road to make money to keep the habitat running and to convince people not to buy exotic pets. So, below you will see Mark and I playing with baby tigers

Mark was being a nice son-in-law and made hamburgers for my family. In the process, he made friends with our dog Newton.

It was great. We watched fireworks at the park, ate pie and peaches, and hung out at my parents' beautiful riverside home. All in all, not a bad fourth.