Day 17 - Brookfield to Monroe City

This day was probably the low point of the trip. I did feel better from the food poisoning of yesterday, but my sleep had been disrupted, and the terrain ahead of me was an endless grind over long hills, on a dirty highway shoulder, next to loud and relentless traffic, into a constant headwind.

I was expecting a certain amount of attention for riding a bike cross-country. I knew there would be lots of questions and conversations, and I was okay with that - looking forward to it, in fact. And in Kansas, I enjoyed those conversations. People would always ask slightly different things, and they would occasionally tell anecdotes of their own or describe local landmarks I should check out.

But here in Missouri, especially today, it feels different.

FOUR TIMES today, I have been sitting alone in a restaurant with my bike just outside the window, or walking the aisles of a grocery store, and someone has wandered up to me with a vague grin on their face and just stared for a while, as though I was an unexpectedly elaborate highway accident.

The conversation is always the same:

"... Is that your bike?"
"Yeah."
"Where ya headed?"
"New York."
"Oh!"

... and then they wander away.

It's not really the content of the conversation that bothers me, or the lack of courtesy. It's the staring.

On my way out of Brookfield I went to a supermarket and bought two heads of romaine lettuce, then washed and ate one sitting on the edge of the parking lot, because I wanted something green to stabilize my digestion. Every car that went in, and every car that went out, did so at a crawl, to get the maximum amount of rubbernecking available before drifting out of range.

I did my best to ignore it, and then set out on the highway listening to a bunch of old comedy from Billy Connolly, which lifted my spirits. His interludes on the banjo were a perfect fit to the deep autumn landscape that scrolled around me.



I also found this little fellow:


Sometime in the afternoon I descended into a big valley, which I was grateful for at first because it was a reprieve from hill-climbing, but about a quarter mile across it the headwind became twice as bad. I took frequent breaks and ate many snacks, but my knees were bothering me from the constant effort. It was totally impossible to coast without being blown to a stop in moments by the wind.

When I got to Shelbina, I discovered that the one motel in the town had been booked solid with hunters. The lady behind the desk was unsympathetic - more interested in her television program than anything else - and said my only choice was to keep on going until I got to Monroe City, about 20 miles farther east. So I got back on the road, plodding along in the dark with my audiobook and taking bites from the big wax-coated hunk of cheddar cheese I'd bought from Miss Kitty. About an hour into the ride, I was struck with a powerful desire for Pho. Perhaps I needed more salt?

If only this industrial structure I passed on the way was making salt... Mmmm...


Monroe City had two motels. A third was out of business, its parking lot filthy and its topiary overgrown. The first motel I tried did not answer when I rang the night bell, so I assumed it was full and proceeded to the second. I counted twenty trucks in the parking lot, but over 30 rooms, so I felt I had a chance.

I rung the night bell and a sleepy man with a very thick Mexican accent unlocked the door. One night in a room: 39 dollars. The bed looked questionable so I chucked my sleeping bag on top.

After 80 miles and 2000 feet of climbing, I was exhausted, and I knew I wasn't going to get enough sleep. I fell asleep wondering if I should find some alternate method of transport to Elmira, NY, so I didn't have to sustain such a breakneck pace.

In my first dream, I was a young woman working in a resort as a maid. As I did my chores I was being threatened by two large men, and I was worried that I didn't have enough family members around to defend me.

One of my chores was to take a basket of laundry to the lodge basement, at the bottom of an old staircase. I placed the basket at the foot of the stairs, but when I started climbing back up, I got a nervous feeling and turned around again. Wraiths and demons were seething up from the basket, making ribbons of colored vapor. They were furious with me. If they touched me I would die. As long as I kept watching them, they could not advance, but I needed to turn around to keep climbing the irregular stairs. I turned around and ran for it, feeling icy hands reach for my neck.

Then I woke up in the dingy hotel room. I realized that what I'd just seen as a demon on a staircase was actually the light from a streetlamp, edging around the thick curtains of the window. I realized that the screaming of demons was actually the whistles from two trains passing only a mile or so away.

It took me some time to calm down again.

In my second dream, I was standing in a kitchen that was actually the command module of a spacecraft. The whole room was mounted on a multi-stage rocket, and it was about to take off for an expedition on the moon. I heard a thunderous blast and felt the floor shake beneath me, and I looked out the window to see the land slowly sinking below the sill.

Then the land began to drift sideways. Something was wrong with the stabilizers in the rocket. The launch was going to fail. Everything in a half-mile radius was going to be immolated in a super-hot explosion of fuel and shrapnel, and I was at the center. I was absolutely guaranteed to die in less than a minute, as soon as the rocket toppled over.

"Oh well, that's it then," I said to myself.

But then I had an idea. Could we fire the stage-separation mechanism, and blast a little distance away from the primary stage of the rocket, to get out of the explosion, and then deploy the landing parachute? I turned, and spoke to a crew member, a grandmotherly woman in spectacles wearing a dish apron.

"Yes," she said. "I think we can do that!"

She poked some buttons and there was another blast, and the room jolted sideways, then ground slowly to a halt as the capsule dug a deep furrow in the face of a hillside, miles from the rest of the rocket.

"That was close," I thought. Then I woke up.

Day 18 - Monroe City to Quincy

As if to make up for yesterday, today was quite exciting!

I set out at exactly 11:00am and went cruising for breakfast. Both of the "downtown" cafes were closed. Two other restaurants were shuttered and up for sale. I couldn't actually find a grocery store, so I decided to cycle down the strip by the highway and get another gross fast-food convenience-store breakfast.

While gathering snacks I fell into conversation with the owner of the shop and his one other patron. They were Best Buds from Way Back™, apparently, and we had an amusing chat about highway systems and weather. That set a good tone for the day.

I sailed out of town with a bunch of cheap protein stuffed into me, and only a few miles down the road, my intestines began percolating and suddenly I had to deal with a "call of nature". I turned off the highway and went speeding north on a paved state road, with the wind at my back for a change. It wasn't on my calculated route, but I needed a more private environment if I was going to take care of this.

A few miles later I found a quiet stand of trees lined up along a dry riverbed. An ideal spot. For the first time on this trip, I broke out my "call of nature" supplies and tromped into the woods to make like the proverbial bear. It went well, and I was back on the road in only a few minutes. I could have pulled a U-turn and gone back to the highway, but since I was already on this paved road, and running parallel to a later segment in my course, I decided there was no harm in continuing in the same direction to see where it led me.

Some pretty nature appeared:


The road plunged down into some forest and then up again, and I began to see houses around me, set far back into large chunks of property. A couple of dogs ambled into the street to bark at me as I rode by. Then, a half mile later, another one. Then I passed by a long driveway and was spotted by two more, and these two began to chase alongside me, yapping at each other and pausing to sniff at the foliage in neighbors' yards and urinate on things. I wasn't afraid of them, but I did get worried that I would lead them too far down the road and get them lost.

In the meantime it was very amusing, so I took some video:


I came to a narrow valley and plunged down into it, rising to a top speed of 40mph, and I was certain that the dogs would fall behind and give up, but as I began to laboriously ascend the opposite bank they trotted up to me and then pulled ahead to bark at another dog standing in a driveway. The hill got steep so I had to dismount and push. I noticed that the dogs were waiting for me at the crest of the hill, as though I was their escort, or their best friend, or perhaps their new owner.

I rounded a corner and a third dog came gamboling across the front lawn of a large house, towards "my" dogs. They all barked at each other and then sniffed butts for a while. A couple of families were gathered in front of the house, gearing up for a ride back down the road on their ATVs, and one of the women set down her cooler and strode over the grass, calling for her dog to disentangle itself - orders that the dog totally ignored. I coasted to a stop and explained my situation to the woman, and she called one of her daughters over, and each of them grabbed a dog and held it down while I attempted to ride away.

One of the dogs broke loose and galloped over to me, all slobber and smiles, so I turned around and came back. The daughter got ahold of the dog again. I was also surprised to see a small, round kitty-cat marching over the lawn towards this brouhaha, as if it wanted to participate. I got off my bike and we all walked over to the rest of the family and their ATVs, trailed by the extra dog and the cat, and we decided that the whole family would take off in their ATVs and try to get the dogs to follow them instead of me, so I could make a clean getaway. "Let's go, let's go! Come on, dogs!" we all shouted, and I jogged behind them and made shoving motions with my hands, and all three dogs got the idea and ran along. I stopped and stood still until they were around the corner and out of sight. Then the stripey cat meandered up to me, as if to say, "Adopt me instead! I'm smaller!"

It was totally adorable:


... But of course I couldn't adopt any kitties. Besides, I would be taking it away from its family. As I gazed around the now silent property, I could count at least five other cats in my line of sight. The place was a zoo.

"That's kind of awesome," I thought. "I bet I would enjoy living here."

I rode on, alone, and the forest thinned away and the land got flatter, and I cruised in a straight line for a half hour or so. Then I drifted to a stop in front of this house:


Who could pass up a photo op like that?



As if the house wasn't enough, I was also treated to some amazing cloudscapes:



And some marvelous views from bridges and fields:



Eventually it got dark, and I reached the intersection of highway A and highway 6. A little frog was hopping across the intersection when I got there, and I scooped him up and placed him on my backpack for a photo:


Hooray for random nature!

Highway 6 was very busy - a disorienting change from the quiet space I'd been biking through all day. It was now obvious to me that the back-roads of Missouri were twice as enjoyable as the highway. Too bad my planned route was taking me out of the state tonight.

I weathered many nervous ups and downs on the narrow shoulder of 6 until it merged with 24, and from there I pedaled onto a long bridge that took me over the Mississippi River and into Illinois.


... Where I found some mostly-authentic Thai food! Huzzah!!! A good end to the day.



After stuffing myself I packed up the leftovers and rode across town to a motel on the east side, reasoning that a journey through the street grid at night would be much more pleasant than the same journey during the day.

Then I booked two days. Time to give my legs some rest, and figure out where I'm going next.