Us and Bill!
There was a memorial erected for confederate soldiers who died in a Union prison in Godfrey (the town where Bill and Mary live). It was really cool, and there was a Wills in the list of names!
Also he showed us a fanastic overlook of the Mississippi. It was a great view, and we could actually even see the St. Louis arch in the distance, very cool! It was great to finally see the river, a major icon of entering the west. It made us realize how far we have actually come!
Riding over it was, of course, a great feeling.
And we entered Missouri, our 9th state!
Due to the storms the Mississippi was very flooded as well. A bike path that we were planning on taking was completely under water - it was clear that the river was much higher than usual pretty much everywhere. We learned from Bill that the last damn on the Mississippi is just upriver of St. Louis, but that it doesn't always work for flood control, clearly!
While we were riding he was also telling us a lot of interesting stuff about the area and about the huge power line towers and how everything like that works, which was really cool.
He also did the Bon Ton Roulet, a big bike tour in the finger lakes, cool!
And it was interesting to see corn fields that were closer to the Mississippi (and probably had had more flooding) that had much less crop growth than fields that were farther away.
Oh and that water you see, that "lake" is not supposed to be there! That's the middle of a corn field. Most fields had some serious flooding. Bill said all the recent flooding had caused the farmers to have to wait much later than usual to plant their crops - no good!
We reached the trail head of the Katy, after off roading a bit, and said bye to Bill, who had to get home to run his weekly Saturday 10-miler with a friend! He and Mary were both great, and we had a fantastic stay with them. Thank you so much guys!!!
We started riding on the trail and only after about 5 or 7 miles decided to get off of it and take Hwy 94 for a bit because the gravel was a little bit mucky and we had to work to get going 7 or 8 mph. It rained a little bit (of course, what's a day without rain on this trip..!) and we for some waffles at a place in St. Charles. Yum. After that we went through a few towns that had been hit by the tornado from the night before. It was kind of crazy! There were leaves and branches pretty much everywhere. We picked up the Katy again but had to get off of it because there were SO many trees that had fallen over onto it. The trail is great though, and it goes right through these little towns, and while on it we rode past houses and some restaurants. Really cool trail - yay rails to trails!
We talked to a Missouri State Park Ranger who we saw checking out the damage to the trail and asked him how much blockage there was ahead and what alternate route we should take, etc. Apparently for the next 30 miles or so there was blockage due to fallen trees or flooding - the tornado had pretty much touched down at the Katy and went east on it, taking down lots of stuff in its path.
Alec knocked this tree down.. (Or maybe the other way around..!)
We took the Katy as soon as we could get back on it, because it's great! And we felt super cool riding on it while water was literally everywhere else for a good 10 miles -- everything was flooding except for us. Woo! We looked at the map and it showed that we had passed our campsite, so we were slightly confused.. but we kept going and there was the entrance to Klondike Park (we found out later it was the back entrance) and it was a super steep climb and kind of long to get to the campsite. We were glad to be there and they had really nice facilities - warm showers and even a camp stove room with sinks and a stove!! It was great.
Daily stats:
Mileage: 64.3
Elevation Gain: 1761
Fallen trees: A million
Average speed: 10.03
Daily haiku:
Dodging tornados,
Might have had a brief tailwind,
Katy trail riding.
You guys are amazing!
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