Southern Illinois, like so Southern it's really northern Kentucky

So, after deciding that we need to return to St. Louis again to see all the things that we missed this time, we headed down to Southern Illinois to see some friends and take in more sights that we missed when we lived here.  After a stop at

 John's favorite baseball card shop to see Mike and drop some cash, we had some dinner that was homemade with Mistee and Emily.  We set out the next morning to see some things that we had missed when we lived here with a tourist booklet that was very helpful.  We didn't know that there was a National Cemetery in Mound City and this was an amazing spot with 3000 unknown 

soldiers from the Civil War to a the most recent veteran in 2012.  Notice the marker that has been swallowed up by the tree above.  They buried Confederates here as well, but all of their markers are pointed and they have this celtic-like symbol on them to delineate that these 

are not US Army soldiers.  They also would add the USCT acronym to the markers of "colored troops" from the civil war.  I assume that they are not still adding that to the new veterans that have been placed here, obviously so you're able to see some racial progress.  It was amazing to see such a large cemetery for veterans in a small town.  It 

gave you an appreciation for how many people have died in service to this country in combat or have served in the armed forces.
  From here, we went south some more to Cairo, Illinois where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet.  This would be a very strategic point you would 

think, but really it's just flooded at this time of year and the saddest town in the US.  I have been to Elko, NV "the armpit of America", and Cairo was worse.  Because there is no reason for it to be so decrepit and downtrodden.  They have two beautiful mansions here that did not tempt us to enter them and even they seemed sad to see what had happened to this town.  We left the sadness to take advantage of the beautiful day again and go play golf

 
 again.  We called the Egyptian  Country Club to see if we could get a tee time that day and then called back because we were both in jeans and I didn't have a collared shirt, but this turned out not to be a problem for this type of "country" club.  We didn't need a cart, we needed an 

 ATV to drive around this course and their mower had been broken, so the rough was really rough.  This was a serious  departure from Canadian Lakes golfing, but are game is as rough as the unmown rough on this course, so it works itself out.  love to everyone, jo