After waking up and eating some peanut butter sandwiches, we were off to complete the final few miles of the KATY trail and then follow my pre-made google maps route southwest to hook up with the TransAmerica trail in Pittsburgh, KS. Mike needed to go to the Tulsa, OK, area and since that was in the general direction, we'd stick together till Pittsburgh.
Well, once we found our way out of Clinton, MO, google maps told me to take a road that jogged southwest through the Truman Reserve. We biked to the road turn off and were met with a "road closed" gate. Undeterred, we went around this and pressed ahead, as most detours we've seen can still be navigated by bicycle.
The road looked like it hadn't been used in 20 years. It had bushes and small trees growing up through the cracks, with the edges already retaken by nature. We navigated around these and fallen trees, only to be met with large holes on each side of small creek bridges. I thought back to the book I read about how long man-built things (roads, buildings) would survive if mankind disappeared, it looks like nature takes things back rather quickly.
But we pressed on, it wasn't too bad and kept us away from traffic. Then we got the biggest bridge and noticed it was missing the far side. As we biked up the the edge, we saw that there was a good 6 foot drop down to the opposite shoreline. Not a game breaker, but we had to remove all our panniers from our bikes and hand them down to the other person standing on the rocks below.
With that over, we kept going on my unique little route until we found out that only the lettered roads were paved, all the other roads like farm roads were gravel. Crap, as half my directions had me go down little farm roads, like I had done back in Indiana and Illinois. After about 6 miles of slow gravel roads, we decided to just take the lettered county roads, which I thought may be full of traffic, but happily they were pretty dead.
For lunch we stopped in Butler, MO, and hit up a little chinese buffet. There we had the pleasure of listening to some redneck guy with his wife and child in the booth next to us. We overheard some great stuff:
"I want to fight your dad!"
"You spend all my money" "No, you spend all your money on yourself" "Myself?? I'm taking you out for food ain't I?"
After we got our full of Chinese food and wonderful overheard conversation, we got back on the bikes. Outside of town there was a "bridge out" detour sign, but we decided to chance that it was cross-able by bicycle and kept going. We got to the bridge and luck was not with us today as the whole thing was being replaced and there wasn't any sane way to cross a 10 ft wide creek.
We sat there thinking of the best option as it was a decent distance to back track and a man stopped in his car next to us and wanted to know if we needed to cross. We told him we did, and he told us that there was a plank down at the bottom to one side that spanned the creek we could use, we'd just need to be careful as it was all of one foot wide.
He got out of his car and showed us the location of said plank and even helped us cross with the bikes, one of us in front of the bike and one behind. He even helped push our bikes up the opposite bank!
Back on the road, it started to get dark and we wanted to make it as far as we could, so we busted out lights and made it as far as Richarde. Rolling into town in the dark, we went by the park and noticed that it was small and the town itself had a population of maybe 100 people. We made our way into one of the covered table areas and made some dinner - Ramen and canned chili! Afterwards we threw our tents up outside the pavilion and fell asleep to the sound of the occasional train blowing its horn as it passed by the town.
Start:
Calhoun, MO
End: Richarde, MO
Distance: 89.36 miles
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