Mizzou-Ra

Section 1 of Route 66 came to a close yesterday in the Gateway to the West, St. Louis. We had close to perfect conditions with a slightly downhill ride to the Mississippi River, aided by a little tailwind for good measure. We crossed over the river at the "historic" Chain of Rocks bridge and was met with my only minor disappointment of the day - there was no Welcome to Missouri sign. After 300 miles across the flat farmlands of Illinois, I was looking forward to the warm greeting, but alas, none was forthcoming. The vast majority of the ride was on bike trails, including the stretch on top of the levee from the bridge down to the Gateway Arch - aka the Worst National Park in the US. Don't get me wrong, it's very cool, but it is NOT a National Park the way every other one is. It is the only one that is man made, making it more of a Monument than a Park. After stopping for the obligatory pictures, we had Epic Pizza and a STL specialty, toasted ravioli, for lunch before the last 20 mile push to Dan's sister's house.

Side note - Dan's brother-in-law, Mike, is a PGA instructor and has been giving lessons for 30 years or more. He also has a net set up in his basement, along with a whole assortment of Ping demo clubs. If Dan had only told me about this a few months ago, I could have saved myself a lot of money and bought my new Pings through Mike and his DEEP discount!

We probably had more hills and more traffic in the last 5 miles of the ride than we'd had the rest of the week, but we were ushered to the finish line by way of a nice bike lane the whole way. My bike will remain in Theresa and Mike's basement (out of the way of the golf area), minus the back wheel, until some future date, likely the start of Section 2 in the fall. Meanwhile, Dan is taking the back wheel back to Springfield for required repair or replacement of the rim, which managed to survive the last two days without suffering any noticeable further damage.

BTW, as you can see from the maps below, for this last segment I used both Strava and Ride With GPS. The apps started and stopped recording within a couple seconds of each other and the distance traveled is within 0.1 miles of each other. RWGPS is clearly for the fragile ego as it claims an additional 500' of elevation gain over 5 minutes less of riding time, resulting in 13.1 mph vs 12.9 on Strava. Personally, I think I have to call bullshit on RWGPS simply because there is no combination of "hills" in the entire state of Illinois that could work up to nearly 2000'. While there were definitely some ups and downs on the Missouri side, I'm just not seeing it.

The next 3 months will be filled with family gatherings, golf and non-bicycle travel. I hope to be back writing again in the fall.

Fortunately for this dude, there wasn't a lot of traffic on the bike path.

The mighty Mississippi

The unofficial end at the Arch