Todd Orr

 We left Bowling Green Kentucky on Sunday, June 25 and headed for St. Louis.  We took a route that brought us to the confluence of Ohio and Mississippi Rivers near Cairo, Illinois.   The river confluence is at Fort Defiance State Park in the southern tip of Illinois.  You take a bridge over the Ohio from Kentucky to Illinois to get to the park (which, frankly, was pretty run down).  In the picture at the right, the Mississippi is on the right of the picture and the Ohio is on the left.  Lewis and Clark camped here at the start of their expedition and the Union had a fort here during the Civil War.  After we left Fort Defiance, we drove through Cairo IL on our way to crossing the Mississippi at Cape Giradeau, Missouri.  Cairo was very rundown and very sad to drive through. We spent the first week of this week complaining about the cool, cloudy and sometimes wet weather.  That changed on our drive to St. Louis.  On I-55 driving north ...

 We embarked on the third and final (and longest) leg of our 2023 baseball and national parks trip on Tuesday, June 20 with cool weather and rain.  We're not jumping right into baseball on this leg - our first game is not until a week into this leg in St. Louis.  Since we had to get from Durham to St. Louis anyway, we took in two national parks and some other attractions on the way. Our first stop on June 20 was Beckley, West Virginia.  This served as the jumping off point for a visit to New River Gorge National Park and Preserve (hereafter called New River).  New River is the newest National Park receiving this designation in 2021.  However, New River was established as a National River and Preserve in 1978.  You might be asking, what is the New River and is it really that New?  The New River has its headwaters near Blowing Rock in the North Carolina mountains but west of the eastern Continental Divide (got that?).  So the New River flows in...