Mississippi River in St Paul, Minnesota Since 2006 I have spent a large portion of my life in the USA. During that time it has been my good fortune to have visited 45 of the 50 states that comprise the USA, and while doing so I have crossed and walked the banks of the great Mississippi River a number of times. This river is the second longest river in the USA. Its source is at Lake Itasca in Minnesota, and it flows 2320 miles from there to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. It is also divided into what is known as the upper Mississippi, from its source south to the Ohio River, and the lower Mississippi, from the Ohio to its mouth near New Orleans, Louisiana This mighty river runs through, or along 10 states, from Minnesota to Louisiana, and was used to define portions of these states' borders, with Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi along the east side of the river, and Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas and Louisiana along its west...
When I moved from Pretoria to Durban at the beginning of 1959 to attend pharmacy school I started to keep a record of my activities and my expenses in a diary that I have no recollection of how or from whom, it was acquired. It is a three-day per page book published by Abbott Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, and it has a bright orange-brown cover. Some entries are brief, others are long, and some comprise only a name. This was the start of a habit I have maintained to this day. For many years I used an annual diary published by May and Baker; their diaries were the perfect size for my needs. Then I progressed to slightly larger ones published by Sabax. Then as I moved up the hierarchy over the years I was presented with desk top diaries, some even with my name engraved on the cover. The ultimate was a leather-bound Filofax. I knew I could not do better than that! Over the years I carefully stored the diaries in a box about 20 cm x 24 cm x 27 cm in size, then I needed a second ...