Day 13: Meredith Twain's Muddy Bears Emporium

Louisiana, MO to Hannibal, MO

Stats!

Miles traveled: 26.9
Total miles traveled: 434.9
Max Speed: 35.5 (2nd new record in 2 days!)

Dean's writing the post today!

We started out today with some worries about serious hills ahead. The map comments said "very steep" hills, which really means something coming from the Adventure Cycling Association. And everyone we talked to said the hills ahead were big serious hills. But we ended up making it a good 14 miles this morning without any major hill problems. There were several chump bumps to deal with but we were up to the challenge.

We saw a large bird crossing the road. Our best guess is that it was a partridge. I mean pheasant.

Then it turned out that route 79 was closed. That reminded us that we had heard something recently about route 79 being closed due to a washed out road. Well, we looked at the detour Missouri proposed, and read the road closed notice on Dean's phone. It looked like it would send us pretty far out of our way and on route 61, which would not be a good road for biking. With that in mind we decided to continue on 79 a ways and check out what was going on. We could always turn around if it was impassible right? And it was still pretty flat, so not a big investment.

So 79 was looking pretty rough. There was some debris that had washed down the hill, plus a good chunk of the road had fallen down the mountain. Thankfully we were on bikes so we could walk them around the rough stuff. Good thing we were on bikes!

After we got past the road closure 79 got a lot tougher. This was where we started to hit the steep hills. The maps said we would have some steep hills with rewarding river overlooks. The scenic overlooks were pretty good, but ultimately not that big of a reward for the hills we were climbing.


Then there were some thunderstorms... We got soaked pretty quick with no shelter in sight. We considered just setting up the tent on the side of the road but didn't want to trespass on somebody. We ended up hiding out under some random peoples' house's eaves(right word?) until the storm passed. Thankfully we had misread the map, so we were much closer to Hannibal than we thought. When the storm cleared we rode up the last big (BIG) hill to the birthplace of Mark Twain.

Hannibal seems kind of a tourist trap town. They're really working the Twain angle all over. We played a couple games of pool, had a few drinks and some sandwiches. Tomorrow's a planned rest day! We're going to do some needed bike maintenance and check out the town some more.