Last Updated: September 11, 2026
This was a week governed almost entirely by the weather. We left Branson and ran north up the Missouri River valley in three hops — an hour to Springfield for an Airstream repair, then Blue Springs outside Kansas City, then Onawa in western Iowa, then Yankton, South Dakota, on the river below Gavins Point Dam. Rain cut Kansas City short. Iowa gave us three days of steady thirty-mile-an-hour wind with gusts to sixty. And the whole route was shaped by wanting to stay out of the way of spring storms on the Plains.
That is Lake Yankton at the end of it, flat as a sheet of glass, three days after we had been building windbreaks out of the truck in Iowa. If you want the argument for why we planned our travel the way we did for nine years, this week is the whole thing in miniature — and it is written out properly in Crossing Tornado Country in an RV.
It is also where the spring finally caught us. We had been traveling inside the bloom since Florida, moving north at roughly the pace the season moves. By the time we reached the Missouri there were Canada geese with goslings on the bank and wild turkeys displaying in the campground, which is the point at which you stop arriving early and start arriving on time.
Visitor Information: This run covers about 500 miles up US 71 and I-29. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is at 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64111 — general admission free every day, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, phone (816) 751-1278, nelson-atkins.org. Cottonwood Campground is a US Army Corps of Engineers park below Gavins Point Dam, reached from Yankton, South Dakota; reservations through recreation.gov, and the Lewis and Clark Visitor Center at the dam is free, phone (402) 667-2546. Lewis and Clark State Park at Onawa, Iowa is at 21914 Park Loop, free to enter, with a full-size keelboat replica; phone (712) 423-2829.
Blue Springs, Missouri and the Nelson-Atkins
From Branson it is about an hour to Springfield, where we stopped for a partial Airstream repair at Reliable RV, and then roughly two hours more to Blue Springs, a suburb on the eastern edge of Kansas City. The site had 50 amp service, water and sewer, no wifi, and the great virtue of being private and quiet.
We were only there a few days, it rained, and we were keeping one eye on the storm outlooks — so Kansas City, which has a great deal to see, got one afternoon. We spent it at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and it was the right choice.
We had expected regional American art and found Monet, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rubens, Renoir and Warhol. There is a reason for that, and it is a good one.
The museum exists because of two people who never intended to build one museum together. Mary McAfee Atkins was a schoolteacher who married well, lived frugally, and on her death in 1911 left $300,000 for an art museum in Kansas City; careful management had turned it into $700,000 by 1927. William Rockhill Nelson founded the Kansas City Star, and his will directed that once his wife and daughter had died, his entire estate should be spent on buying art for the public. Two separate institutions were planned. The trustees looked at the money, looked at each other, and combined them. The building opened on December 11, 1933, and admission has been free every day since.
The timing is the other half of the answer. A fund dedicated entirely to acquisition came available in the depths of the Depression, when European paintings were cheap and old collections were breaking up. Kansas City spent the 1930s buying what it could never have afforded twenty years earlier — which is why a city of that size holds a van Gogh, and why Laurence Sickman, a young Harvard-trained curator buying in China, had assembled one of the finest Asian collections in the United States by 1941.
The Warhol portrait is of Marion Bloch, who with her husband Henry founded H&R Block in Kansas City. The Blochs gave the museum their collection and their name to the building that holds the contemporary galleries — Steven Holl’s Bloch Building, opened June 9, 2007, which Time put first on its list of the year’s best new architecture. The giant badminton shuttlecocks scattered across the lawn outside, eighteen feet tall, are by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
It does not feel like a large museum while you are inside it. The galleries are calm, nothing is crowded, and you are never herded — which is a trick of the layout rather than the size of the collection, because the holdings run to tens of thousands of objects across nearly every culture. We liked it enormously, and we saw perhaps a third of it.
Thomas Hart Benton’s Persephone is the one to stand in front of. Benton was a Missourian, painted the state constantly, and taught a student in New York named Jackson Pollock — so the man who made American painting look like muscular rural realism trained the man who blew it up. Both of them are in this building.
Our other pleasure was watching service dogs in training work their way around the galleries with us, which struck us as the ideal use of a quiet museum on a wet afternoon.
Onawa, Iowa: Three Days of Wind
We stayed at the KOA at Onawa — full hookups but only 30 amp service, with wifi fast enough to stream. We will be blunt, because we were: the owners were rude and the customer service was poor, and we would not go back.
The weather settled the rest. For three nights the wind blew a steady 30 mph with gusts to 60, and it was cold with it. We ended up parking the truck to make a windbreak with the Airstream so Jake the dog had somewhere sheltered to sit outside, and he spent his afternoons there watching fish jump and complaining about the Canada geese. We did laundry, sorted photographs and caught up on the blog. It is not a glamorous entry in a travel journal, but anyone who has done this for years knows those days are most of the reason the rest of it works.
We were briefly thrilled to spot a bald eagle across the water. Enlarging the photograph revealed a carved wooden one. It was a very good carving.
We never left the campground, so we should say plainly what we missed, because Onawa has more in it than we gave it credit for. Lewis and Clark State Park is a few minutes away, on Blue Lake — an oxbow, a piece of the Missouri that the river abandoned when it changed its mind — and it holds a full-size reproduction of the expedition’s keelboat, along with replicas of the two pirogues. Onawa also claims the widest main street in the country. The town takes its name from a character in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. And in 1920 a local man named Christian Nelson invented the chocolate-coated ice cream bar here and called it the Eskimo Pie; the brand was renamed Edy’s Pie in 2020, the company acknowledging that the original name was a slur.
Yankton, South Dakota
Yankton is a small city on the Missouri in the southeastern corner of South Dakota, looking across the river at Nebraska, just downstream of Gavins Point Dam. It is a river town and it knows it. It is also a town whose entire history is a story about being first and then being passed over.
The name comes from the Yankton Dakota, and in their language it is Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋ — “the end village,” the people at the end of the camp circle. Yankton was made the capital of Dakota Territory when the territory was created on March 2, 1861, and held it for twenty-two years. It did not lose the job when the Dakotas split. On June 2, 1883, six years before statehood, Territorial Governor Nehemiah Ordway simply moved the capital to Bismarck — a maneuver that Yankton regarded, with some justice, as theft. When South Dakota entered the Union in 1889 the capital went to Pierre, and Yankton has been called the Mother City of the Dakotas ever since, which is the kind of title you get instead of the thing you wanted.
It was also once known as a cement city, which turns out to be exactly right and better than we realized at the time. Yankton quarried Fort Hays limestone and manufactured Portland cement in quantity — enough that Yankton cement was shipped south to help build the Panama Canal. A river town in Dakota Territory put its rock into the Isthmus of Panama.
Walking the Meridian Bridge
We walked the Meridian Bridge from Yankton into Nebraska and back, and there was almost nobody else on it. Jake got to explore off leash and there are long views up and down the Missouri.
The bridge deserves its name. It is a 3,013-foot double-deck vertical-lift structure, dedicated on October 11, 1924 as a toll crossing, and it was the last link completed in the Meridian Highway — an auto trail conceived to run the length of the continent from Canada to Mexico, which later became US 81. It carried traffic for eighty-four years. Then the new Discovery Bridge opened on October 11, 2008, the Meridian Bridge’s own dedication date to the day, and the old bridge was retired. Yankton kept it, converted it, and reopened it to walkers and cyclists in November 2011.
The padlocks are the usual love-lock business, and they are heavy enough in aggregate that the city has had to think about how many a hundred-year-old truss should be asked to carry. We added nothing and took photographs instead.
Cottonwood Campground and Gavins Point Dam
Cottonwood is a Corps of Engineers campground below the dam, and it comes with a geographical oddity that took us a minute. The campground is in Nebraska, although it sits on what feels like the South Dakota bank, and the only road in runs through Yankton. The explanation is that the state line was fixed to the Missouri as the river ran when the boundary was drawn, and the Missouri has moved since. The river changed its mind; the state line did not.
Our site overlooked Lake Yankton. We had 50 amp service and nothing else — no water, no sewer, no wifi — and it did not matter at all, because the sites are spacious, the place was nearly empty in May, and the water was right there. It is clearly a local favorite in summer.
Gavins Point Dam was completed in 1957 under the Pick–Sloan Missouri Basin Program, authorized by the Flood Control Act of 1944 — the same program, and the same era of dam building, that produced Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley at Land Between the Lakes. It is an earth and chalk fill embankment, 74 feet high and 8,700 feet long, impounding Lewis and Clark Lake at 31,400 acres. It is the last dam on the Missouri: below this point the river runs 811 miles to St. Louis without another one, and the 59 miles immediately downstream are protected as the Missouri National Recreational River because they still braid and shift and build sandbars the way the whole river once did.
The pelicans are American white pelicans, and there were hundreds of them stacked up in the tailwater. They are among the largest birds on the continent, with wingspans over nine feet, and unlike brown pelicans they do not dive — they swim in coordinated lines and herd fish into the shallows to scoop them up. A dam tailrace delivers stunned and disoriented fish through the turbines continuously, which is why you find them below dams in numbers you will not see anywhere else on the river.
And here is the thing we did not know while we were standing there. The bluff the dam is anchored to is Calumet Bluff, and on August 30, 1804 Lewis and Clark held their council with the Yankton Dakota on it — one of the few genuinely cordial meetings of the entire expedition. The Corps’ free Lewis and Clark Visitor Center sits on that bluff today. We watched the pelicans and never went up. The town across the river is named for the people who met the expedition at the exact spot now holding back the lake, which is a lot of history for one piece of ground.
There was a surprising amount of wildlife in the campground, and we suspect the reason is simply that there was almost nobody in it. Canada geese with goslings, white-tailed deer coming down to drink, wild turkeys walking through the timber, a garter snake going into the lake, squirrels everywhere. An empty campground in May on a river bottom is about as good as casual wildlife watching gets.
We had lunch twice at River’s Edge, which has partial views of the Missouri, fair prices and good food. After a week of weather and a very long stretch of our own cooking, that was more welcome than it sounds.
Practical Tips for the Missouri River Run
Arrive at Cottonwood self-contained. There is 50 amp electric and that is all — no water hookup, no sewer, no wifi. Fill your fresh tank and dump before you come, and expect to use your data plan. In exchange you get big private sites on the water at a Corps price, which is one of the best deals in American camping.
Navigate to Cottonwood through Yankton, not through Nebraska. The campground is legally in Nebraska but the only access road comes from the South Dakota side. Some mapping apps will try to send you the long way around. Set the destination and then look at the route before you commit forty feet of rig to it.
Respect wind on the northern Plains in May. Our three days at Onawa ran a steady 30 mph with 60 mph gusts, and that is normal rather than exceptional out here in spring. It is not weather you tow a travel trailer in. Build the extra day into the schedule before you need it, and if you are stuck, a truck parked to windward makes a usable outdoor room out of an unusable one.
The Nelson-Atkins is free, every single day. No ticket, no timed entry, closed Mondays and Tuesdays. That means you can go for an hour without feeling you have wasted an admission, which is the right way to treat a museum this size. Park in the underground garage, which is paid, and go out onto the lawn afterwards for the shuttlecocks.
Walk the Meridian Bridge early or late. It is a mile and a quarter round trip to Nebraska and back with no shade and no wind shelter at all. Early morning is calm and empty; midday in a Plains wind on an exposed deck is another thing entirely.
If you stop at Onawa, give it half a day. We did not, and we should have. Lewis and Clark State Park with its full-size keelboat is minutes from the interstate, the main street is worth seeing for its sheer improbable width, and both are free.
Look for the pelicans below the dam in spring and fall. American white pelicans concentrate in the Gavins Point tailwater on migration, and the numbers can be remarkable. Bring a long lens; the good viewing is from the bank and they will not let you close.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Yankton the capital of South Dakota? Yankton was the capital of Dakota Territory, from its creation on March 2, 1861 until 1883 — not of the state. On June 2, 1883, Territorial Governor Nehemiah Ordway moved the capital to Bismarck, six years before the territory was divided and admitted as two states. When South Dakota entered the Union in 1889, Pierre became its capital. Yankton is still called the Mother City of the Dakotas.
Why is the campground below Gavins Point Dam in Nebraska? Because the South Dakota–Nebraska boundary was fixed to the Missouri River’s channel as it ran when the line was drawn, and the river has shifted since. The boundary did not move with it, so there are parcels of Nebraska on the north bank and parcels of South Dakota on the south. Cottonwood Campground is one of them, and the only road in comes through Yankton, South Dakota.
Why do white pelicans gather below dams? Fish passing through the turbines arrive in the tailwater stunned and disoriented, which makes for easy feeding. American white pelicans do not dive for fish the way brown pelicans do — they swim in coordinated groups and drive fish into the shallows — so concentrated, confused fish at the surface is exactly the situation they are built for. The Gavins Point tailrace draws them in numbers on spring and fall migration.
Can you walk across the Meridian Bridge at Yankton? Yes. The 1924 double-deck lift bridge carried US 81 traffic until the Discovery Bridge opened in 2008, and it reopened in November 2011 for walkers and cyclists only. It is 3,013 feet long, crosses from South Dakota into Nebraska, and is free and open year round. The railings are covered in love locks.
Is the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art free? Yes — general admission has been free every day since the museum opened on December 11, 1933, funded by the combined bequests of Mary McAfee Atkins and William Rockhill Nelson. Special exhibitions are sometimes ticketed and parking in the garage is paid, but walking in and looking at the Monet, the van Gogh, the Benton and the Asian collection costs nothing.
What is there to do in Onawa, Iowa? More than we managed. Lewis and Clark State Park sits on Blue Lake, an oxbow of the Missouri, with a full-size replica of the expedition’s keelboat and its pirogues. The town claims the widest main street in the country, takes its name from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, and is where the Eskimo Pie — now Edy’s Pie — was invented in 1920.
When is the best time to RV the Missouri River valley? Late spring and early fall. May brings goslings, nesting turkeys, migrating pelicans and nearly empty Corps campgrounds, but it also brings the wind and the tail end of severe storm season. September and early October give you calmer air and fall color with the same emptiness. Midsummer is hot and the Corps parks fill with local boaters.
From Yankton we carried on north into South Dakota proper, to Mitchell and the Corn Palace.
