Pomme De Terre Lake - Exploring a Trio of Missouri Lakes

We are getting more practiced at hitching the trailer to the pickup. It was time to hitch up again and head to our second Missouri lake of this trip--Pomme De Terre Lake. We found a spot in another corp of engineer park, nestled in the trees and right along the river.

We were still learning about our weight distribution hitch and the best way to hook the pickup to the trailer. This day we learned a painful lesson. The weight distribution bars weigh over twenty pounds, and we had them leaning against the pickup so they would be easy to put in place. But while Denisa was loading some things in the back of the pickup, that three-foot-long bar crashed from its standing position and fell right on the top of her foot. Ouch!! If Denisa knew any cuss words, she would have used them! When she took off her shoe and sock to assess the damage, it was already bruising. Even though nothing seemed to be broken, this wasn't going to be good for our planned hiking!

So Mark had to do the rest of the hitching while Denisa hobbled around. It's a 40-minute drive from Stockton Lake to Pomme De Terre Lake, over hilly Missouri back roads. We took Road A through Donnegan, and today we had enough sense to not make any stops at Amish bakeries. Besides, there wasn't enough room in those parking lots that were designed with hitching posts for horses rather than RVs. We saw some lovely fall foliage on the drive, and found this popular river campground almost full on a Thursday. We took a picture down the Pomme De Terre River that was right behind our trailer. We decided we should kayak the river while we are camped here.

Since Denisa's foot was too swollen to put on her tennis shoes, it looked like she would be wearing crocs for the rest of this trip. But she did find that she could ride her bike. Before we left our nice spot along the river, we took a bike ride on the nearby trail.

It was a good day to ice a swollen foot, and cook out on our cast iron grill. Mark cooked a whole package of bacon, then some pork chops and hamburgers. While we really like the idea of the bracket on the side of the trailer that holds the heavy grill, we found that we don't like the grease splatters on the side of the trailer after cooking. We also found out that Denisa seemed to forget to pack a lot of the things we needed for our planned meals. She is used to traveling in a motor home where we have everything with us. The bad news was that she forgot to pack soft butter, salad dressing, hot dog buns, mayo, mustard, and hot sauce. So this day we had BLTs with your choice of either guacamole or raspberry jelly as a condiment. The good news was that we had lots of Amish desserts to eat with everything!

The next morning Denisa put on her stylish crocs, and we decided to try some short hikes. We visited another free Missouri state park. We tried the 2.5-mile-long Cedar Bluff Trail in Hermitage State Park. Amongst the cedars on the Cedar Bluff Trail were lots of maples that were at their peak fall color.

We were hiking slower since Denisa was hobbling along on her hurt foot. But this was an especially slow hike since we were stopping to take so many pictures.

We walked to the end of the trail at the swim beach, for more views of fall foliage across the lake.

That state park and that trail were so successful, we decided to try another. So we drove to Pittsburg State Park to try the Indian Point trail. Denisa's crocs made this 3.2-mile trail that was much faster because it was lined by oaks trees with brown leaves--rather than the colorful maples that we had enjoyed earlier. That means that we didn't need to stop to take so many pictures on this trail. We did have to take a photograph of some of the different-shaped leaves that we found on the forest floor. Even though they have different shapes, Google plant identifier thinks they all came from oak trees.

The turn-around point of the Indian Point Trail was a peninsula out in the water that looked over Pomme De Terre Lake. We had to look up the meaning of this unusually-named lake. We found that Missouri must have some French roots that gave this water the French words meaning "apple of the earth."

After hobbling through the first two days at Pomme De Terre Lake, we're ready for another form of transportation that will rest Denisa's swollen foot. But we'll talk about that on another blog soon.