Aboard the Mississippi Queen

          I was lucky to be on the Mississippi Queen during one of the fall foliage cruises scheduled in September and October on the upper Mississippi. Choose the lucky time and the colors can be great.

        On the trip you visit the home of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his cave in Hannibal where he grew up; you steamboat passed Keokuk, Iowa, where the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers meet. You stop at Dubuque, with the Woodward Riverboat Museum and a cable car taking you up a bluff for a magnificent view. You pass places where fur traders met many decades ago, and arrive at Lacrosse, Wisconsin, where the Mississippi meets the Black and La Crosse Rivers. For bargains in down comforters and jackets, go to the factory outlet of The Company Store; for tasting go to Christina Wine Cellars in the 100-year-old Milwaukee Freight House or the Heileman Brewery; and for a good
view go up to Grandad Bluff. On the last day, many bends in the river later, you arrive in Saint Paul, the uppermost point of commercial navigation on the Mississippi.

        By then you have visited the pilot house and learned that the Mississippi is the most crooked river in the world and drains 41 percent of the United States, and that sandbars occur on the inner curves of the river bends, and
that you call a vessel a "boat" on the river, not a ship, and that the speed on the river is in miles per hour, not knots as it is on the sea.  And you have gorged on soul-satisfying food traditional to the river country -- shrimp remoulade, crabmeat Louisiana, fried catfish, jambalaya, creole gumbo and pecan pie.

        Tips on fall foliage: The most intense colors occur when it has been neither too wet or dry (drought cause leaves to wither, heavy rainfall makes them fall too quickly). Warm sunny days and cool nights usually mean spectacular colors.

          -- Shirley Linde