Mississippi Journey

Interactive exhibits let you take the wooden wheel of a towboat simulator and flood Dubuque -- a replica, that is -- at the stream table. Audiences viewing a storm brewing in the film Mississippi Journey feel their seats shake as thunder roars and lightning flashes.

Outside, steps away from the famed waters, the new limestone River Walk connects the museum and aquarium with the new Grand Harbor Resort and Waterpark and gives visitors a chance to stroll beside the swift-moving waters.

Fat pots of sunny marigolds, along with benches and old-time streetlights, line the path, which extends for a third of a mile. Kids wave at sailors on large commercial barges and other passing craft.

Anticipation grows as guests pull into the Grand Harbor's parking lot, where muffled shrieks echo from the tube slide that twists in and out of the facility, promising every child's dream weekend. There's an astonishing maze of tunnels inside, and even a bucket that drenches revelers with 800 gallons of water every nine minutes.

Pruny-fingered kids may beg to stay all day (and night), but Dubuque's longtime attractions beckon, making it easy to drift into the city's past.

A good beginning comes with "ka-chunking" 189 feet up a steep bluff on the Fenelon Place Elevator in a small wooden railcar that seems to go straight up a wooded hillside. The trip takes two minutes if the hilltop operator uses the high speed, twice as long on low. Passengers hang on from the first lurch. A Dubuque mayor, who also was a wealthy banker, had the line built in 1882 so he could reach his bluff-top home faster than by horse and buggy. At the top, travelers are rewarded with a panoramic view of three states: Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Mansions, built by early settlers who made fortunes on river trade, cling to hillsides. Many of those homes are bed-and-breakfast inns today. Far below, Dubuque's shops, galleries and restaurants fill historical brick buildings.

Off in the distance, the bluff-top grave of the city's founder, Julien Dubuque, a French-Canadian fur trader and farmer, resembles a brick castle turret overlooking the river. Other European settlers followed Native Americans in mining lead, which helped power the city's growth. The brick shot tower, where workers made lead bullets for the Civil War, still stands.

In 1868, miners discovered what remains one of the area's best-loved attractions: Crystal Lake Cave just south of town. Sweater-clad visitors follow a guide into large rooms and narrow passageways on 45-minute tours of the shadowy world 40 feet underground. Guides invite visitors to touch some of the cold, glassy stalagmites.

Emerging back into the summer afternoon, cave-goers blink in the bright sunshine. It's already time for dinner and then a riverside stroll, grounded in this old city that marries past and present, town and river into an ideal union.

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