I have to play around with my handlebar position to address my hand numbness and trapezius soreness.

Sunscreen and bug spray and breathable second-skin bandages are important things to have every day on the tour.

Seeing the country by bike allows you to see and appreciate things that are impossible to see and appreciate by car, and that applies both to flora/fauna/geology and to human action and human history.

This country is vast. Vast.

The courage, intrepidness, and iron will of the people who explored and settled the American frontier are mind-boggling.

• Steak: typically either prime rib or filet, so still low-fat cuts
• Barbecue: because going to Kansas City and not eating barbecue is just wrong
• Beer: maltase can crank up my blood sugar, so I usually don't drink beer any more, but this tour was an exception
  
• Ice cream
  
• Swedish fish: red ones
• Licorice: black ones
• Bread products: bread, hamburger buns
• Fried potatoes, although some of them were sweet potato french fries, so at least a wee bit more healthy ...
• Pancakes
• Bacon
  

It turned out to be a great coincidence that we ended our ride in St. Charles on the 4th of July. Not only does Independence Day commemorate the same spirit that inspired me in the Lewis & Clark expedition, but St. Charles also does its 4th of July celebration up right. It's a large small town, with a historic downtown and a gorgeous riverfront. When we walked down to Riverfest, we happened to be approaching just as a traditional band was playing the fitting Liberty Bell March by John Philip Sousa, which is perhaps best known as the theme song for Monty Python's Flying Circus. As four Monty Python fans, we all appreciated the simultaneous celebration of individual liberty and fine British comedy!

The St. Charles train depot is charming and quaint, and beautifully maintained:

We sat near it to watch the fireworks that night, which were seriously probably the best fireworks I've ever seen!

Along this stretch the Katy Trail winds through areas settled by German immigrants, including Rhineland, where we saw this lovely church:

The bluffs and hills along the Missouri River here are also the center of Missouri's wine country (including towns like Hermann), where the descendants of German immigrants make German-style wines, including those from white grapes like vidal blanc and seyval blanc.

Here's some of Team Corps of Discovery in action on this gorgeous day:

We stopped for the typical lunch of cycling champions (peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, mixed nuts and dried fruit, and apples and oranges) in Treloar, where another cyclist kindly took a picture of the entire Team Corps of Discovery:

I only rode 32 miles on the last day, because of my sore wrists and trapezius. But the reason I stopped there was so I could remember enjoying the 32 miles I did ride, instead of grumbling through the whole ride.

That meant that I was driving the sag wagon into St. Charles. Not only was the trailhead in St. Charles right near the park where the 4th of July festivities were taking place ... our hotel was literally feet from the trailhead! So I got us all checked in, showered, made a dinner reservation at the brewpub at the trailhead, and reflected on a very fun tour!

The first part of the ride this day was rolling country roads, and in Boonville:

we picked up the Katy Trail. The Katy Trail is the longest rails-to-trails trail in the U.S., along the line of the former MKT (Missouri-Kansas-Texas) Railroad rail line, which stopped service in 1986. Over half of the MKT line runs along the Missouri River at the base of the bluffs, so the ride is a flat crushed limestone path with trees, bluffs, swamp, and floodplain. There are also several neat steel truss bridges, such as this one further east on the Trail:

We lunched in Rocheport, at a bike shop/cafe along the trail:

We saw lots of flora and charismatic megafauna: horsetail (scouring rush), which has a high silica content and is still used to polish reeds for woodwind instruments; box turtles, terrapins, lots of dragonflies, tiny jumping toads, a bull snake, deer, indigo buntings, bluebirds, ...

I rode 61 miles, and they were enjoyable because the road and trail were both beautiful and scenic. However ... my road bike is not the best bike for riding the Katy Trail, so by the time we got to Tebbetts, my wrists and my shoulders/trapezius muscles were very sore. I was feeling every vibration in the surface.

That night we stayed in the Turner-Katy Trail Shelter in Tebbetts, a bunkhouse for cyclists right on the trail. It had the most important feature of any overnight stop for a cyclist: a hot shower with great water pressure!

We drive back up I-35 to get back on our map's route, and we sit. And wait. And get some coffee at the convenience store. And wander through the fireworks tent next door (I was always drawn to the ones that promise giant flaming balls!). And wait. There was just enough lightning to make us leery, but not enough rain to drive us into the car to wait it out.

So we decide to drive on to Lawson, Missouri, hoping that as we moved east and the storm moved northeast our trajectories would diverge. Sadly, it was not to be. We hung out in the town park, in a pavilion, and then as we thought the storm passed we headed into a local cafe for a morale-boosting mid-morning snack. Sadly, we left the cafe in as much rain as we entered it ...

We drove a bit further along the route, and the weather cleared up sufficiently that we thought it was worth trying for a bit of a ride. I'm pretty risk averse about lightning, so I offered to drive. The guys got in 5 miles of riding, but the lightning line ahead of us was still too close and too threatening to make riding safe.

So we packed it in and headed to get some lunch in Lexington, which has a lot of importance in American history. Situated on the Missouri River bluffs, it lies on the Lewis & Clark Trail. It's also the site of a 3-day battle in the Civil War, and was the location of Russell, Majors & Waddell. RMW were the main outfitters for people heading west on the Santa Fe Trail, and they later founded the Pony Express. We didn't go check any of them out, but there are several points along the Santa Fe Trail through Missouri where you can still see the wagon ruts from the trains of Conestoga wagons heading west. Here's a snap of me with Matt and Al in front of the Lexington Pony Express memorial plaque:

After lunch we headed out in hopes of finding clear weather for afternoon riding. No such luck. More rain, and enough thunder to make us all uncomfortable at the thought of riding. Truly exasperating, to be raring to go but to have this yes-no-maybe back-and-forth with the weather.

So we head to our terminus for the day, Marshall, Missouri. We ran into some bad mojo at the Super 8 Motel where we had a reservation; the owner would not let us bring our bikes into our rooms. This is the first bad mojo we've encountered in the entire tour; everyone else has been welcoming and curious about our trip. So we left, walked our bikes across the street in a driving rain to the Comfort Inn, where they welcomed our business enthusiastically (and gave us cleaning towels to dry off our bikes).

After a utilitarian but uninspiring dinner at Applebee's, we topped off our frustrating day with a wee dram of Highland Park and a good night's sleep, to ready ourselves for Thursday's ride.

Wipeout!

It hurt. Yowie, did it hurt. But I didn't break or sprain anything, either on myself or on my bike. I have some spectacular scratches and bruises, as you can infer from my right leg and left index finger here:

I lost a day of riding on Sunday, but I'm fine. It's really too bad, because the weather was glorious and the route between Nebraska City, Nebraska and White Cloud, Kansas was spectacular. Rolling hills, huge fields of corn swaying gently in the wind, bright blue sky. The guys had a great day of riding; Al in particular was ecstatic.

Interestingly, when we got to White Cloud, where we were planning to camp, we found the marina "campground" a foot deep in mud from flooding three weeks ago:

So we drove on to Atchison, Kansas, and got a hotel. I love Atchison! More on Atchison in a separate post, but it has a great rail history and we puttered around next to the old Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad depot for some time:

Among other things, this trip is an exercise in adaptation, and again I feel like I'm channeling Lewis & Clark: you don't undertake as enormous an enterprise as theirs without realizing that you will have to adapt to dynamic and changing conditions. Today threw a lot of things at me that required adaptation (nothing on the scale of the Corps of Discovery, but still, the simile strikes me as apt).

Extra points if you can identify the quote in my title: it's from Episode 34 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Harold Pither's cycling tour of Cornwall ("September 2nd. Did not fall off outside Iddesley.").

The Loess Hills are generally located between 1 and 15 miles (24 km) east of the Missouri River channel. These hills are the first rise in land beyond the flood plain, forming something of a "front range" for Iowa, and parts of Missouri and Nebraska adjacent to the Missouri River.

During the last Ice Age, glaciers advanced into the middle of North America, grinding underlying rock into dust-like "glacial flour." As temperatures warmed, the glaciers retreated and vast amounts of meltwater and sediment flooded the Missouri River Valley. The sediment was deposited on the flood plain, creating huge mud flats. When meltwaters receded, these mud flats were exposed. As they dried, the fine-grained silt was picked up by strong prevailing westerly winds. Huge dust clouds were moved and redeposited over broad areas. The heavier, coarser silt was deposited close to the Missouri River flood plain, forming vast dune fields. The dune fields were eventually stabilized by grass. Due to the erosive nature of loess soil and its ability to stand in vertical columns when dry, the stabilized dunes were eroded into the corrugated, sharply-dissected bluffs we see today.

Not only are they geologically interesting; they also make for great cycling along the Loess Hills Scenic Byway. The wind vascillated between head wind and tail wind, and it was sunny all day.

We also couldn't resist the photo op in front of this wonderful old sign on the side of a building in Pacific Junction, Iowa:

And we ended the day with a visit to the Missouri River Basin Lewis & Clark Visitor Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Informative and fun exhibits, including a replica of the L&C keelboat that induced some roleplaying:

One of the great things about this ride is that even driving the route is gorgeous, so doing my share of driving the sag wagon is OK.

I was driving the last leg of the route, into Missouri Valley, Iowa, where we were planning to camp in the municipal park. Until we saw that the camping area was under an underpass, next to the local swimming pool, and surrounded by jungle gyms and the local fairgrounds ... luckily, the Days Inn a mile away had room for us.

We cleaned up and headed south to Council Bluffs to see the Lewis & Clark monument there; Council Bluffs was a major location in their journey because it was the location of a meeting with the leaders of several local tribes. President Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark out with one of their missions being to engage the Indian tribes in friendly commercial relations, and this meeting was to be an important part of advancing those relationships. Thus the name of Council Bluffs, and the memorial there, commemorate the importance of this mission.

Council Bluffs is across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska, and I had found us a local micro-brewpub for dinner and good beer. So we headed out, in advance of an extremely threatening-looking sky. As we walked into the L&C memorial in Council Bluffs, we heard the severe storm warning siren from Omaha. So we got to watch this extremely serious storm roll in:

It was just stunning to watch the wall cloud move through at 50+ miles/hour, which we did until the wind and rain reached us on the other side of the river. We watched the wind through Omaha knock trees down into transformers, and we could see the shocks and sparks from all the way across the river as the transformers blew. The wind also kicked up serious dust, and as we watched, the dust cloud blocked our view of Omaha -- totally obliterated it.

The storm passed very quickly, and when we got to Omaha the summer arts festival had its vendor tents blown down. Luckily for us, the historic area near the river still had power, and we really enjoyed our dinner at Upstream Brewing. I really liked our Omaha visit: