My name is Dan Faust. I was born in 1958. I retired in 2020. I live in Central Illinois with my wife (Carol) and my daughter (Jennifer).
I took my first canoe trip as a Boy Scout in 1969 at the age of 11. I have been paddling ever since.
I enjoy canoeing and kayaking on just about any size river or stream. I have dabbled in whitewater when I was younger, but now I pretty much stick to tamer stuff, although some of the places I paddle do have big waves and strong currents.
My “Glory Days” blogs are about my first trip down the Mississippi River in 2021. That trip was a solo journey for me. I paddled with a few friends for a couple of days, but mostly I was on my own. I ended up getting more support from my family and River Angels than I expected, so even though I was solo, I had a lot of support. That trip lasted 64 days, and overall it was an incredibly rewarding experience.
My “Mississippi 2022” blogs are about my trip down the Mississippi River with Dale “Grey Beard” Sanders, Matt Briggs, and Matt Taylor, as Dale set a new Guinness record as the oldest person to paddle the Entire Mississippi River ( EMR ) from Source to Sea ( S2S ). It was an incredible accomplishment, that I had the privilege to witness. It was an awesome adventure, plus I made some great friends.
My “Missouri 2024” blogs are about my trip with Matt Taylor as we paddle down the Missouri River during the Summer of 2024. Stay tuned for more on that trip. It promises to be another epic adventure. I plan to post about once a month between now and the start of our Missouri River trip. Once the trip begins, I will post every day, until the trip is over.
One of the unique things about my trips down the Mississippi River is that I have taken two different routes to the Gulf of Mexico. On my first trip I turned off of the Mississippi and took the Atchafalaya River to get to the Gulf of Mexico. The Atchafalaya is by far the most popular alternative to paddling the Mississippi River through Baton Rouge and New Orleans. That part of the Mississippi river is very industrial and has huge ocean going ships. One my second trip, we stayed on the Mississippi River all the way to the Gulf. If you are wondering which way you should go, read each of my blogs and decide for yourself.
These blogs are posted in reverse chronological order. That is to say, the last blog post written is the first one listed. If you would like to read the posts in the order that they were written, an easy way to do that is to click on the “Index” link in the site menu, or one of the Index links below, and then start at the beginning ( or wherever you like ).
There is a “Previous” and “Next” link at the bottom of each blog post to make it a bit easier to continue on, or go back, one post at a time.
I hope that this content will be helpful to other paddlers who want to explore the Mississippi River or the Missouri River.
The purpose of this page is to facilitate the use of my blog sites for people who are doing research for their own paddling trip down the Mississippi or Missouri Rivers. I hope it helps. There’s a lot of information to sift through.
My “Glory Days – Part 1” blog is quite long. It contains a lot of extra stuff.
I began posting about my planning and preparations for my 2021 trip as practice, to improve my blog writing. That turned out to be nearly three years before my trip actually took place, thanks to a delay caused by the covid pandemic. With so much lead time, my blog got quite long. There are actually more posts about planning and preparations, leading up to that trip, than there are about the trip itself.
All in all, the Glory Days and Mississippi 2002 blog sites combined contain well over 300,000 written words, which is comparable to a full length novel. It would take an average reader ( 300 wpm ) more than 17 hours to read all of it. You have been warned!
There are two Resource Guides and a Frequently Asked Questions page included in my Glory Days blog sites. These pages are designed and intended to help people, who are doing research for a Mississippi River trip, get to the meat of the information contained here without sorting through everything.
Dan Faust 