Day 127: Trail of Tears State Park, MO

In my last post I noted how much Alea had enjoyed riding the other day.  I've noticed that I've also been finding the riding a lot more enjoyable, and I suspect a big reason is that we are now riding toward the sun every morning, and the winds tend to favor traveling eastward (the latter was certainly my experience back in 1985 when I crossed the continent).

One thing that has occurred, due to all this heat and humidity, is that we have been finding ourselves getting off the road a bit too early each day (in order to avoid riding in the worst of the heat).  That leaves us with a lot of time on our hands, and with weather that isn't conducive to very many activities.  And if we are in a cell reception dead zone, it can make for a long, boring and uncomfortable afternoon.  Especially since it is WAY too hot to be leaving Lana in the van for more than a few minutes at a time without leaving the air conditioner running.  That nixes most tourist activities that could otherwise get us indoors for an hour or two.

Thus we have decided, unless we have a lot more than 50 miles to cover in a day, to return to our spring and fall routine of lingering a bit at our campsite in the morning before heading out.  That also puts us riding in the extreme heat for another hour or so during the day, but it leaves us with fewer hours to pass at our campsite in the oppressive heat, waiting for a thunderstorm to rumble through to cool things off, or for the sun to dip far enough on the horizon.

So what that means for today's ride is that it was the first day where I experienced a few hours with a heat index near or above 100 degrees.  The result was major leg cramping toward the end of my 50 miles, in spite of washing down as much Gatorade as I could handle, plus downing a banana and various snack food.  I suspect my body will adapt to the new stress soon enough, that it was just a bit of a shock to the system today.  With Alea's riding pace, she has already had a few such days over the past two weeks, so our schedule change isn't as likely to affect her as much.

So we've learned at least two things so far on this trip: 1) we will forever avoid cycling most of the northeastern United States (at least within a hundred miles or so of the Atlantic Coast), and 2) when we travel coast to coast in the future we will choose a trajectory more to the north of where we currently are, opting to head through the mountains where possible when we again need to head south toward Georgia or Florida.

I finished today's ride in downtown Cape Girardeau, MO.  From there we loaded everything in the van and drove to Trail of Tears  State Park, where we are camped for the night ($21, power, vault toilets, community water and there are showers down the road a ways).  We have a view of the Mississippi River, where we see barges passing by fairly often.  We also have a view of the train tracks.  The trains move fairly slow and thus aren't too noisy, but there is a crossing gate not far away so they blare their horn as they approach it (that is very obnoxious).  I'm not optimistic that the train traffic will decrease in the evening, as this a major freight corridor.  But we'll only be here one night, and this will be our last night in Missouri.

The one interesting thing that occurred on the road today was that I found a baby possum walking along the shoulder of the highway.  I stopped to get a picture of it, and soon discovered why it happened to be there: mom had been killed in the middle of the road.  I went over to investigate and found another baby crawling over her, and a few others who were suckling, trying to get that last meal that she had left for them.  It was a pretty sad sight, and no doubt within a few hours those little ones were snacks for a fox, coon or similar predator (provided that they did not get run over, in which case the vultures and crows would be doing the clean up).

We bought a collapsible bucket today, in order to deal with our lack of a water pump with which to access our on-board water supply.  At 1.3 gallons, it gives us adequate water for cleaning up after cooking.  And it is light enough that we can carry it and our 3 gallon Igloo water cooler to the hydrant at the same time.  To keep unwanted things from getting into the water in the bucket, we cover it with our cutting board.  And if we need to put the hatch down, we place the bucket in the sink.  It's a simple enough solution until we can affect a repair to the pump (which likely needs to be replaced).