Harry S. Truman Lake - Exploring a Trio of Missouri Lakes

We planned to visit three lakes around Missouri on this ten-day trip. We finally got moved into our last camp site at our last lake named after a president with local ties--Harry S. Truman.

This was a cheap ten-day vacation since we enjoyed half-price senior rates on the already half-price off-season camping rates. That's just $5 per night here at Truman Lake. While the water was turned off at most of the campgrounds, we were learning more about where to get water. At Truman Lake, we camped at Sparrow Foot Campground, where the best entertainment were the local armadillos.

These animals are blessed with an armor exterior for protection because their poor eye site and hearing give them no warning of an approaching predator. They also are not warned of an approaching photographer, who got very close before the armadillo finally responded by jumping straight up into the air. This unusual movement surprised the photographer so much that by the time she finally snapped the picture, only the front legs were still in the air. Doesn't he look like he was smiling at Denisa's startled reaction to his startled reaction?

We rode our bikes around the camping areas, and visited with some very friendly campers. We also found that the campground hosts were very nice. But we never put the kayak in the water at this third lake of our trip. We thought finding pretty fall foliage was more fun than paddling at this stop.

We took a road trip one day, to the nearby town of Clinton, Missouri. This is the western terminus of the famous Katy Trail. An old railroad bed, it has been repurposed into a delightful biking and hiking trail.  Because the old trains couldn't pull loads up steep grades, it provides an almost flat trek across the state of Missouri. We noticed that the first miles of the trail run beside the highway, so we opted to drive on to the little town of Windsor to see a more remote section of the Katy Trail.

The section that led out of Windsor, Missouri, was completely shaded, and many of the trees were turning into their beautiful shades of fall. You might notice that we were not biking this popular bike trail. That's because we learned that transporting our bikes was not as easy as it used to be. They used to stay on the bike rack on the back of the pickup, so the bikes were ready to go wherever we drove. But now they are on the bike rack on the back of the trailer. To transport them to Windsor, we would have to unload the bikes, then unbolt and move the rack from the trailer to the pickup, then rebolt the rack and reload the bikes. When we finished, the whole rack had to be moved again from the pickup back to the trailer. It's a big job that we decided not to do this day. Denisa's foot was less swollen from its encounter with the distribution hitch, so she could finally put on a shoe. So we hiked on the Katy Trail.

We only walked a couple miles of the trail, then turned around and walked back. At our first intersection, we saw an interesting sign, "Horse-drawn vehicles prohibited." That's because we were in the middle of Missouri Amish country, where lots of horse-drawn vehicles are used for transportation.

We had a list of Amish businesses in the area, and after our walk we went exploring on the narrow dirt roads to find them. We have learned that the more horse poop you find on the road, the closer you are getting to the Amish communities. We stopped into several Amish grocery stores, and tried hard to remember that we had already splurged on a bounty of Amish goodies at our first stop in this trio of lakes. We were eating the Amish desserts with reckless abandon, and we even convinced ourselves that pumpkin crunch can count as a vegetable side-dish for a meal. 

It's been a great nine-nights of camping at lovely corp of engineer campgrounds on three of Missouri's lakes! But we were ready to get home. We might have been in a hurry to get back from all this camping to do some trick-or-treating with our two favorite goblins back home!