Day 067 - St Jacob to Glen Carbon IL

We drove thru heavy rain staging my car. By the time I started the walk it had become a light rain that tapered off as the day went on. Temps stayed in the 50's.

During the first hour I walked for more than a mile along a flooded field that reminded me of the cypress swamps in First Landing State Park (formerly Seashore State Park) in Virginia Beach. The many "No Trespassing" signs on the trees confirmed that these were normally fields. You could see from the high water marks on the trees that the water level had dropped over a foot. A number of snakes and turtles had come up to high ground on the highway and been run over.

I came across a large harrow, an piece of farm equipment which has many disks used to toil the soil. Next I departed US 40 to start to make my way towards a pedestrian bridge to cross the Mississippi River. I would have liked to take US 40 all the way to San Francisco but on the other side of St Louis most of it is on Interstate 70. The only other major highway that goes from St Louis to San Francisco is US 50 which I will be following for the rest of the walk.

I am certain that I found the correct location for the twenty five US 40 pictures that I walked past. There were another forty five pictures in the book. Of the remaining pictures I will only be able to get the final two. I will walk past the corner in San Francisco where US 40 ended in 1953 and will walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. Today US 40 as a posted highway ends at Interstate 80 near Park City, Utah.

All US 40 pictures were posted to Facebook using Instagram. Instagram is an application I loaded on my smart phone which logs the geographic coordinates of each picture. I documented the title and page of each picture to match the "US 40 Today" book.

I walked past the Mersinger Log Cabin which was built in 1857 and restored in 2002 by the Troy Historical Society. After completing today's walk I had a request to drive to Collinsville to take a picture of the 170 foot tall water tower in the shape of catsup bottle that was erected in 1949 by the G.S. Suppiger Co who were the makers of Brooks Catsup. This is the first picture I have taken that I have not walked past.