Wouldn't a ride on this be fun :)

[Lenny]

Get on in Tennessee, head North, and a part of a memory...

I'd be in.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/10/24/delta.queen/index.html

Let's see. A few Donzi folks meet in Tennessee, we all get on, have a few laughs and nights, and end up in OHIO. :)

[zelatore]

A complete shame if she goes away.

Growing up in southern Indiana, I had plenty of opportunities to see her in action. Ironic that I now live only a few miles from the place she was built (Stockton, CA)

[Donziweasel]

Don, how did they get her from CA to the midwest?

[zelatore]

On her own bottom...through the Panama Canal. Although she was towed and didn’t make the trip under her own power.

She was part of a pair (the King and Queen) with the hulls originally built in Scotland then shipped to Stockton where they were fitted out and competed for the San Francisco to Sacramento run. After WWII, the Queen eventually was taken to work the Mississippi, Ohio, and Ten-Tom waterways while the King deteriorated, sank a couple times, and was eventually saved as hotel/museum piece permanently docked in Old Town Sacramento. I see her often as it’s a nice 30 mile or so run in the Donzi from my place up to Old Town.

The 'island' I live on, Grand Island, is bordered by the Sacramento river on one side, and Steamboat Slough on the other - named because it was the shorter route for the old steamers to take on the Sacramento run.

Several of the old riverboats from that era are still around serving in various states of disrepair as clubhouse for some of the yacht clubs in the delta. Most passed away to fires long ago. Hal Schell (the ‘delta dawdler') wrote a book chronicling many of them and tells of finding rotting hulks in strange places, like the middle of what are now fields where they had once served as migrant labor bunk houses. And a couple of the old boats gave their last in a most unusual effort to save a flooded island here in the delta. A levee had failed, and nobody could figure out how to rebuild it and dewater the island (all the islands here in the delta are below sea level and survive only because of the levees) A local came up with the idea to take some of the old steamers, float them into the breach, then use the paddlewheels to drive the water from the interior of the island back into the river. And it worked.

http://www.steamboats.org/steamboat-pictures/delta-queen/delta-queen-history.html
http://www.steamboats.org/steamboat-pictures/delta-king.html

[Lenny]

WOW :eek: :eek: :eek:

:yes:

[Donziweasel]

Nice! :)

[CHACHI]

In 1986 I took the Delata Queen from Cincinnati to Pittsburg on the Ohio for my companys 20th anniversary. Enjoyed the ports along the river. Don't think I could drink as much now.

Ken

[Tim Morris]

Don't think I could drink as much now.
Ken

...not a question of thinking, more a question of knowing

Aren't you the guy who celebrated his brains out into the wee hours last Saturday?

...or tried to?

[Ghost]

I'm pulling for her...

[zelatore]

Any word on getting the SOLAS exemption renewed? This was the first I had heard that they weren't going to renew it.

Is there a petition or something we can sign?

I'd hate to see this boat become nothing more than another floating hotel or museum. Sure, they can build a new replica with a steel house, but you can only have the original once.