We drove across the Mississippi from Davenport, Iowa to Rock Island Arsenal. This is an active army base so we had to go early and bring our passports. We entered the visitors center and waited while they ran a background criminal check on the four of us and took our pictures. We were then given a visitors pass which we had to present to a guard along with our drivers licenses. Once inside we drove to the museum only to discover that it did not open until noon.
We continued driving around and came upon the home of Colonel Davenport, a trader with the Native Americans and a supplier to the army. He built a mansion on the river along with a doll house which was an exact copy of his home.
As we approached our next stop we noticed some white pelicans in the water. We had never seen them before.
We went to the Lock and Dam 15 and watched a movie about the development in the area and listened to a very interesting ranger, This dam was the first one built because the rapids here made shipping so difficult. They figured if this one worked, they could build more. It did. We learned that one barge can carry as much as 16 train cars or 70 semis!
We watched a boat move a barge that was doing work on the lock. The bridge had to move in order for the boat to get the barge where it needed to be. The people who were waiting to cross the bridge had a long wait in the hot, humid mid morning. After this we went to check out the golf course and had lunch there.
Then we went back to the museum and saw a huge collection of guns and rifles.
As we were leaving we watched some of the soldiers prepare for some event in the grass behind a display of cannons and tanks. We could not believe they were functioning in long pants and long sleeve shirts when we were dying in the heat watching them.
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