When author and photographer Gayle Harper learned that it takes 90 days for a raindrop to travel from the Mississippi River’s headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico, she knew she had a new project: Follow the path of that raindrop. That path became a book, “Roadtrip with a Raindrop: 90 Days Along the Mississippi,” full of photos and a series of vignettes. Along the way, Harper said she found that there’s something special about life on the river. “The cultures, the accents, the foods, everything on the surface changes,” Harper told “St. Louis on the Air” host Don Marsh on Tuesday. “But what I found, there is something that just feels to me like river energy, that is just a warm, open-heartedness. That was consistent all the way. There is something unique, I think, about people near the river.” Harper started at Lake Itasca in Minnesota, where the river “just springs right out of the side” of the lake, and plotted a 90-day path to the gulf. “Other than where I was going to sleep, I didn’t
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