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The RV has been winterized and is in storage for now. So before I leave to write about a few other non-RV adventures this fall and winter, I thought I would take a little time and look back at some of my favorite RV experiences from the last three years.
Visiting every state park and historic site in Missouri, the state where I have lived my whole life, has turned out to be an education. Missouri is a diverse state and despite its many failings, our strength is the Missouri Conservation Department and our system of State Parks.
Missouri State Parks Booking Site
You can see that we still have a lot to do in SW Missouri.
There is so much beauty and a few hidden gems we have found that many of my fellow Missourians probably aren’t familiar with. One of those is a small state park right off Interstate Highway 70, which connects St. Louis to Kansas City and beyond.
It was July 2020 and RV travel was the best and safest way to go. We spent a very quiet week at Graham State Park. Most of the other campers came in around 6 or 7 PM each evening and were gone before we woke up. Most days it was just us.
The park is named after the historic cave, which is not that spectacular to see but you have to read the history and then you will be impressed. This cave provided evidence which was contrary to an earlier theory. The University of Missouri and the Missouri Archaeological Society excavated the cave between 1949 and 1961.
Artifacts found in Graham Cave were dated by the radiocarbon method and provided important evidence about human adaptation to the environment at the end of the ice age. This showed that the region had been inhabited for at least 10,000 years . Previously, archaeologist had only found evidence of habitation dating back 5,000 years. So this was a big deal!
The park is small, just 386 acres and includes a nice hike through the Graham Cave Glades Natural Area. The quiet gives you a sense of the hunter-gatherers who lived in this area during the ancient Dalton and Archaic period.
We loved the park so much, we went back in 2021. It was still special but there is nothing like the memory of getting away in July 2020 when the pandemic was just four months along and vaccines were not yet a guarantee.