[slide width=”400″ height=”300″]

I know that we promised not to start anymore posts this way, but today was a hard day. It was hard physically and mentally. The terrain has gotten hillier, and we spent the day feeling like we were riding a really slow roller coaster. We also miscalculated our mileage. We thought that we had an 80 mile ride to Chester IL, but we figured out pretty early on that the mileage is really about 110. Also, we spent a little more time getting through St. Louis than we had planned. Even if we had been physically able to ride the whole way, there just weren’t enough hours of daylight. I think that this is going to start being more and more of a problem. Mentally, I am feeling anxious. Tuesday night my sister, Kate, is driving up from Memphis to visit us, and I am really excited.

So, we set out this morning and had to ride about 25 miles to downtown St. Louis. We saw the arch, but had trouble taking a picture because it is so big, and we were so close to it. We also stopped by a bike shop, they didn’t have the right size tires to replace Mike’s worn out tire, but they did have a really cute bike shirt (on sale) that I bought, a new rearview mirror for Mike and some cleaning fluid for our bike chains. We’ll just have to replace Mike’s tire with the spare that we brought with us.

After our shopping trip, we stumbled around the city a bit more, looking for the bike path that runs along the river (we never did find it) and tried to get frozen custard at Ted Drewes (they were closed for the season). We ended up just grabbing lunch at McDonalds.

Finally, we made it out of the city, and started hauling for Chester. We decided to take 231 to 61 south. In hindsight, we might have crossed the Mississippi in St. Louis and taken route 3 through Illinois. As it is, we didn’t make it to Chester, we have not crossed the Mississippi and we are still in Missouri. Poo. The route that we did take, although almost the whole thing is a signed bike route, very little of it even had a shoulder, and when it did, there was usually a rumble strip. Also, there was some road work in progress, and Mike and I found out that the road was closed about 65 miles in, with no detour. The road portion that was closed looked short, so we decided to just go for it. Unfortunately, there was also an unfinished bridge involved. Fortunately, the bridge was completed enough for us to carry our bikes over. After 90 miles, we finally made it to our motel in St. Genevieve. It was a long day, but we did pretty well, and tomorrow we will finally cross the Mississippi River and make our way across a new state.

-Sarah