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.
[Read more…] about Blue Springs, Missouri to Yankton, South Dakota: Wind, the Nelson-Atkins and the Council at Calumet Bluff