Two of the replica boats normally on display at St. Charles’ Lewis and Clark Boat House and Nature Center are down south for a few days.

The boat house’s keelboat was taken by trailer earlier this week to the Memphis area to be part of an educational display at the national meeting of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. The gathering is at Olive Branch, Miss., a Memphis suburb.

Meanwhile, Boat House director Bill Brecht said, a crew from the Discovery Expedition - the local group of Lewis and Clark-era re-enactors - took one of the Boat House’s pirogues down the Mississippi River to the Ohio River to the Tennessee River to a commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the death of explorer Meriwether Lewis.

St. Charles also sent the city’s convention and tourism director, David Rosenwasser, to the Lewis and Clark meeting and is running television commercials in Memphis this weekend to promote St. Charles as a tourist destination.