Bellevue

Bellevue sits pinched between limestone bluffs and the Mississippi River, and the whole town seems organized around getting you a good view of the water — a riverside park, a bluff-top state park, a marina where fishermen swap stories every morning regardless of the catch. We arrived not expecting much beyond a lunch stop and ended up staying until sunset, drawn back to the water again and again.

Lock and Dam No. 12

Down at the river’s edge, Lock and Dam No. 12 controls a stretch of the Mississippi’s navigation channel, and we spent nearly an hour on the observation platform watching a barge tow — a tugboat pushing what looked like a small floating parking lot of grain barges — inch its way through the chamber, water level dropping several feet as the gates worked. Lia, who’d never seen a lock operate before, kept narrating it like a sports commentary, and by the time the tow cleared the far gates we’d made unlikely friends with a retired lockmaster who explained the whole system, unprompted, in more detail than we could retain.

Bellevue State Park’s butterfly garden

High on the bluffs above town, Bellevue State Park holds one of the largest native butterfly gardens in the Midwest, a sloped meadow planted thick with milkweed and coneflower that in late summer hums audibly with monarchs and swallowtails. We climbed up in the late afternoon, the river valley opening below us in a long silver curve, and Lia — usually unmoved by insects — spent twenty minutes crouched motionless trying to get close enough to a monarch to photograph its wings without startling it off.

Getting There

Dubuque Regional Airport (DBQ) is the closest, about thirty minutes north via Highway 52. From the Twin Cities or Chicago, Bellevue is roughly three to four hours by car along the Great River Road. A car is necessary for reaching the bluff-top state park and exploring the scenic river drive, though the small downtown near the marina is easy to cover on foot.