Day 24- St Joseph, MO > Chillicothe, MO (87 miles)

 May 31-

The route:

Today's ride had me a little anxious because it looked to be raining at the start of the ride, and we have 87 miles  and 4k of ascent...we have had much better weather so far on this trip than I would have imagined, and we assumed we would find some wet stuff as we got into the Ohio Valley plus we dodged a couple of weather bullets in Kansas. Reality was that it was raining when we started this morning. I hate to sound a little soft, but it sucks to start riding your bike in the rain. If you get wet while riding, it is not a big deal as long as you are not cold AND wet. There is just something about beginning a ride in the rain that seems like a bad idea. We had a decent shower on us for the first 10-12 miles, and then it was done; the good news is that it was not a cold rain, and we were properly garbed. The terrain for today was Missouri rollers, which we now understand...they are numerous, steep, and mostly short - see photos below. We had almost zero flat ground today, and you can see this on the gradient picture. The surprise was that many of these rollers were 7-10% gradient, and we had a couple in the 12-15% range. This means we work hard to get momentum through the bottom of the hill so you can glide up a bunch of the next roller. We had some truly terrible roads for part of the ride, and we also had some incredible roads that I'd ride again in a minute...Bittersweet Symphony. We had a SAG at mile 31 where the town of Maysville welcomed us and made sandwiches and cinnamon rolls for us...pretty amazing. 

Some photos from the day:

These were some great rollers...

This was in Maysville where they rolled out the red carpet for us, and I felt like this truck belonged in Griffin, GA.

This was our whole group of riders massed around the cinnamon rolls...

This was a museum in Maysville (that also smelled like my grandmother's house.) When I look at old tools like some of these, a bonus quote comes to mind..."When ships were made of wood, men were made of steel." Look at some of these tools and pretend you could use it properly...

Maybe if we had signs like this in Griffin, our drivers would be more respectful of cyclists.

Cool barn on the road today...

Quote for the day that I read recently, and it sticks with me...

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by statesmen, and philosophers, and divines...Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be misunderstood is to be great." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance. Emerson's Self-Reliance should be required reading in schools today. How many times are you entrenched in a position without really thinking about it, and you are just using muscle memory?

Tomorrow has us riding 75 miles over similar terrain into the town of Kirksville, MO.