Where three rivers meet …

We have come to the end of the Illinois River and are now on the mighty Mississippi! The Missouri River also converges near here.

Several great marinas compete for Looper’s business here. At least two have covered docks (something new to us), clean showers, restrooms that all work! (Take nothing for granted!) The two we stayed at have dock and buildings designed to float up during periods of flood waters and down at low times like now. Even the swimming pools are integrated in with this floating-facility-system!

Here are some pics of Grafton Harbor Marina and Alton Marina. Notice the very long/high pilings, they enable the whole facility to go up with the floodwaters.

Sonny & Linda Diehl of Beachfront, Shelly & Ray of Shellerina behind them, Sandy & Peter Kurtius of Tipsy Turtle, behind them Diane & Ray Parrish of Radian Journey, Terry Patchen of Beachfront front- right.

.

Everybody followed Peter & Sandy up to the dance floor!

Terry Patchen, Alton Marina owner Karen Baker-Brncic, and Linda Diehl

.

Jeff of Many Moons, Loren Rich of Das Boot, and Mike Hayes of Wind Shift

.

above: Marcy & Bryant Holmes of Elenor Grace with Shelly!

.

Terry, Linda, Karen, Marcy, Sonny, Brant, Diane, Ray, Mark, and Ray… poolside docktails!

After a stretch of river where we were close to nature and “on the hook” each night, we really appreciate a bit of civilization too. The staff and management at both Grafton Harbor Marina and Alton Marina are great. They really appreciate the business of both the season-long customers AND the transient Loopers like us.

This week these marinas both showed their appreciation with live music parties, fireworks, and all the trimmings.

We are glad we stayed at both.

Above: the grand finale fireworks!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s