Day 9: We've Been to Hill and Back

St. Louis, MO to Augusta, MO

Stats!
Miles biked: 53.9
Total miles biked so far: 308.2
Max speed: 23 mph
# of mountain ranges biked: 1.5 (Blue Ridge and Appalachians)
# of mountain ranges covered via support vehicle: 2.5 (part of Appalachians, Alleghenys, and Ozarks)
# of times Dean's chain fell off today: 0!
# of times Dean was off the chain: 6

First let me say that we took _a ton_ of pictures today, but we have a very weak signal and are having problems uploading them. When we get somewhere with a stronger connection we'll edit this post to include photos.

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday. My parents picked us up in Blacksburg to take us to Illinois and we were exhausted when we arrived. We had originally planned to bike Illinois and southern Missouri (the Ozarks), but it would have been 8 days of miserable biking through mountain ranges, and the same distance only took 30 minutes by car. So I asked my folks to drop us in St. Louis. We didn't quite make it last night, but they took us to St. Louis early this morning. THANK YOU, Mom and Dad, for the final use of the support vehicle! I think our trip will be much happier without 600 miles worth of mountains. 600 mi of mountains on a bike = unhappy Meredith = unhappy Dean = lame honeymoon.

And even going 600 miles by support vehicle, we'll still cover thousands of miles -- certainly more than 3,000 -- on the trip, so I think it still counts as cross-country.

And! Our ride from St. Louis to Augusta today was great! We started off at the arch, which was beautiful. The gateway to the west! Downtown St. Louis was amazing. I definitely could live there. It has a lot of old city feel, and it smells like hops! Beautiful architecture, very bikeable, multiple universities, a great park. Loved it!

Once we got out into the suburbs, things got a little tougher. We definitely had a hilly ... maybe 10 miles or so. And one of the roads that we were on for about 4 miles was being resurfaced, so it was rough and grooved the whole way. NOT ideal biking, especially on steep hills. We were white-knuckling it.

Then the map told us to go through this suburban neighborhood (and they had a typo on the street name), and instructed us to sneak under a chained off area and cut through a housing complex parking lot. It was signed "PRIVATE PROPERTY NO BICYCLES" but we did it anyway. What choice did we have? We don't know our way around Maryland Heights, Missouri.

It led us to a path that took us across the Missouri River. We stopped at a little restaurant on Mallard Lake and had some refreshing beverages before we started to tackle the Katy Trail. Dean had his first mid-ride beer. We saw an awesome T-bird in the parking lot.

The Katy trail is crushed limestone, and flat, flat, FLAT (Dean wants me to say it was "flatter than piss on a plate."). Haaaaaaaah-le-lu-jah! It mostly followed the Missouri River. Very pretty. It smelled of honeysuckle most of the way. We saw lots of turtles, a few cranes, and the bluest birds you've ever seen. I don't think they were Bluebirds or Bluejays -- they were electric blue and shiny. They were a dark bright blue, if that makes sense at all. I tried googling but have no idea what they are. Anyone know?

We stopped in Defiance, MO for ice cream, on the recommendation of a random stranger in the suburbs of St. Louis. It turned out that the ice cream shop was also a bike shop! Dean got a new jersey (apparently he is now a huge Hawkeyes fan -- should go over well in Iowa) and replacement tubes since we've had a few flats. The shop was really cute, and they had a shop cat named Harley who was very sweet. The ice cream was excellent.


Not long after, we arrived in Augusta, got a place to stay, and had dinner at the brewery. Somehow, Augusta - pop 218 - has a brewery, a winery, and 5 B&Bs. The food and the beer were fantastic.

Tomorrow should be hillier. We'll see where we end up!