[ride reports] [photo album this trip]
Missouri
IL-MO Tour
August24-26, 2002Highlights
Saturday Day 1
We hit the highway early in the morning and kept a pretty good pace with minimal stops until arriving in Hannibal, MO at a few minutes past 11am. From there we took 79 south, which is a scenic and twisty river road running parallel to the Mississippi River. A little bit after noon we were in the suburbs of St. Louis. I was really hungry at this point and needed a break badly, we stopped at the first submarine sandwich shop available.
After lunch we headed south . There was construction and a detour, much traffic and it was hot and humid by now. The roads looked more twisty on the map then in actual life. By early afternoon we were in the middle of the state of Missouri. The roads were traveling on traveled though a bunch of forest preserves and some were nicely curvy. By 5PM I was feeling tired already, probably because we started out so early and I didn’t get too much sleep last night. We had no destination really, we were just going to stop at some point and return home tomorrow. If we kept this pace up we could still hit Arkansas today. Then it started sprinkling, but we kept riding. It was actually refreshing. After about an hour and a half it started raining hard. We decided to take a small brake under a tree ad see where to find a motel room. After about 20 minutes it was down to a drizzle again and we continued to head South.
Poplar Bluff, MO on the map was the next biggest town that we would be able to find a motel and a restaurant in. It looked like about an hour away. We were very close to the Arkansas state line, but we were ready to call it a night. After about two hours, we finally arrived in Poplar Bluff, the rain and some major construction and a huge detours delayed us. We had no where to pull over to change our tinted visors for the clear ones in the construction zone. I was ridding with the visor up so I could see and the rain was going in my eyes. But after a pretty miserable two hours we pulled in to the first motel on the road., which turned out to be a good one. It was still only about 9:30PM so we headed out to the restaurant next door where I ordered a tall one and we got to throw peanuts on the floor.
Sunday Day 2
We were headed home, but we didn’t want to travel the same roads as yesterday. We decided to go north towards Lake of the Ozarks. It was a bit out of the way, but didn’t look so bad on the map. We would make up time on the highway somewhere. The roads North were good and twisty, but some needed new pavement. We ran into a bunch of traffic around the Lake of the Ozarks, that I wasn't expecting. We stopped and had lunch at the Salty Dog. Started heading back via backroads and finally hit 70 which we were only taking up until 19 North. Somehow the hours just flew. I also had a set back when I got pulled over by a NARC. He didn’t give me a ticket though, the road was under construction and with some signs and markings missing it was hard to tell when one should stop. I sort of stopped, but apparently not long enough. No ticket.
By the time we made it to Hannibal, it was already 10 PM. We went to a Country Kitchen to get some late dinner. I was beyond tired already and of course after a big meal I had no more energy to keep going. It was over 300 miles to get home and just the though of riding in the dark on the interstate didn’t excite me just one bit. We ended up getting a room at the Travel Lodge. I passed out from exhaustion.
Monday Day 3
We got up early and were on the road by 6AM and figured we could make it home in about 3.5 to 4 hours. The first highway was pretty much empty and we were making great time. We figured we were doing so well, that we stopped for breakfast at around 8AM, which was a mistake, because once we got on I-55 we were crawling all the way home and there was a few cops out too. Made it home at around noon. A half a day late.