Getting to Garden of the Gods

After another great night at Mistee and Emily's house with cute

 dogs, cards, and a great meal, we headed out for more touring of the area.  At this point, we are now getting to the point of just driving down small roads that lead absolutely nowhere and  

 would normally make a person believe that they have completely left any sign of civilization.  We are following 3 different maps in order to find things and still not sure what roads we are on. 
We are stopping when we see signs for historical markers and just finding weird things. 

 Heading in the general direction of Cave in Rock on the Ohio river we decide to stop at tower rock and it's one of those times where even in daylight, you're freaked out?  We are on this small camping road and we are walking toward where we think that this tower rock might be, there's a suburban parked in the area, but no one anywhere.  I told John to take note because the police would be questioning us later on what happened to the people in the suburban...

but they were just fishing and you couldn't see their heads over the banks.
Moving on to Cave in Rock, which was a really big cave in the limestone rock of the river edge.  Not very original in the naming here folks, but Lewis and Clark used it as a marker, but also stayed clear because river bandits would use it as a lair...So, not really sure which is historically accurate

We decide to have some lunch in a small diner in a town the size of a diner, and I get a grilled cheese with bacon sandwich.  What a freaking concept people!!!  Why have I not had this as a menu choice all of my life?  Some catfish, since we are in Southern Illinois and anywhere further north than here seems to ignore catfish (probably because it's a bottom dweller who's not good for you, but tastes so good).

We are hitting all of these strange things like the iron furnace.  What the hell is this you ask?  A huge furnace out in the middle of nowhere where they smelted pig iron for the ironclad ships used in the Civil War.  Which then got shipped to Mound City to make the ships and then put in the river down in Cairo, so we're going backwards up the ship building process.  This thing was huge as you can tell by how small John is in the picture, but we couldn't figure out how they got the iron in and out of this monster without a crane.