Category: Cycling

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

Bryan and I wake up this morning to find the note Mandy’s left on her bed: Super hungry, took a key, going to eat waffles. We join her downstairs and stuff ourselves with fruit and waffles and yogurt and more waffles, then go back to bed and doze until ten. We leave our bikes in a storage room at the hotel and checked out. After another Metrolink ride, a tour of the old Union Station, and a lunch of bad Chinese food, we walk to City Museum.

This place is incredible. AMAZING. They’ve used salvaged junk from all over the city – architectural odds and ends and pipes and rollers and industrial doodads and musical instruments and tile and marbles.  There are beautiful undulating metallic walls made out of cafeteria pans.  There are concrete dragons and fish and tunnels and crawlways and metal mesh tubes that connect one story to another. You can disappear into the space inside a fish’s mouth and come out in a crawlway on top of a sort of cask and then find yourself under the floor of another level, next to a train, and then you’re coming out of a metal web on your head onto a floor made of tiles that look like the back of a turtle. I put three new holes in my shirt. Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 8+9 (St. Louis)”

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

After a tour of the Least Private Men’s Bathroom in the State, we all sleep well and get up in the morning right on time. The ride across town to the Amtrak station takes about twenty minutes.  The station here is unstaffed, so we just sit outside until the train arrives.

 

The conductors and attendants help us lift our bikes onto the train and park them right at the end of our passenger car. We’d wondered if we’d be allowed to leave the panniers on the bikes, and sure enough, we were. The bikes are even in the same car we’re in, making it super easy to get to all our stuff. Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 7 (Sedalia – St. Louis)”

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

Click here to see todays route map.

Those lights that were supposed to go off last night at eleven do go off…this morning at six. It wasn’t a great night of sleep, but we took what we could get. We packed up and rode to Casey’s General Store to answer questions from other customers while sitting on the curb eating our breakfasts – pastries, pickles, jerky, breakfast pizza. We bought food for the whole day in case we didn’t see another store, and we hit the trail.

Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 6 (Boonville – Sedalia)”

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

Click here to see todays route map.

Why is everything always closed? When we planned this trip, we’d had imagined little towns every few miles with ice cream shops and burger places.  The guidebook seems to indicate that’s the case.  Apparently the guidebook author was bad at his job, and has never actually tried to eat food while riding the Katy.

We have a snack before hitting the road this morning, riding along the river bluffs I remember from trips as a teenager to this part of the trail.  We’re expecting to have a good breakfast in Rocheport, at the much-loved Trailside Cafe.  We’ve been hearing about it all week.  It’s closed on Wednesdays. Annie’s doesn’t open until noon. We find the general store, which opens at eleven. I stick my head inside the cool, dark store at 10:15 and talk to the girl who’s baking. She grudgingly lets us in and we sit in the still-dark wooden store and order beef sandwiches and quiche, and when the owner shows up he makes our breakfast. Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 5 (Huntsdale – Boonville)”

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

Click here to see todays route map.

We briefly rename this trip “Tour de Places that HAVE NO FOOD.” The old restaurant in Tebbetts is closed this morning. Hoping for breakfast in a few miles, we hit the trail. But Wainwright is only a sign in the road, there’s nothing more than wild mulberries at the trailhead in North Jefferson. Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 4 (Tebbetts – Huntsdale)”

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

Click here to see todays route map.

Marthasville is quiet at night, but gets noisy very early. The trash man comes at about four am, and it isn’t long after that when farm trucks start powering up and down the highway and chains and doors start banging at the gas station across the way.

The ride to Peers is pleasant, but we’re feeling slow this morning. We eat breakfast sandwiches in the ratty room off the little store here, listening to the locals visit at the next table.  Their subject this morning is the flood: it’s bad in Iowa already, and the river here is already full – it’s forecast to start serious flooding as early as next week. The talk is that this flood could be as bad as it was in ‘93, and there are photos on the wall showing the store in different years, including in ‘93, when the water came up almost to the awning on the first floor doorway.

While we eat, laundry dries on the lines strung between our bikes, just outside the door.  Kids get dropped off and then picked up – the store seems to be a sort of stop along the way for pretty much everyone in town.  No guns allowed. Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 3 (Marthasville – Tebbetts)”

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

Click here to see todays route map.

For a hundred reasons, today does not start as planned. We sleep later than we’d intended, and don’t leave the house until about eight.

By nine, we’ve bought new allergy medicine for me, lots of snacks for the trail, and a bizarre breakfast.  Walgreens shopping excursion complete, we eat breakfast on the benches outside. Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 2 (St. Charles – Marthasville)”

This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.

Click here to see a map of todays travels.

The train’s late. I think the train’s always late. I’ve been sick all week, with a sinus infection, or allergies, or SOMEthing. We skip supper because all the drive thrus between our house and Little Rock have lines about eight miles long. We get to the station in plenty of time tonight, though, and box up our bikes and sit in the old station, waiting.

Later, we settle into the lower coach of the quietly sleeping, nearly-full train. Bryan’s in a window seat next to a person-shaped blanket. Mandy’s on the aisle next to a grandmotherly-looking older woman who snores loudly. My seatmate is a middle aged woman with a half-full catheter bag. There’s something very wrong with her, though we can’t really have a conversation about it – her speech is garbled and confused. I move carefully as I doze, afraid to hurt her. But in the night, when my sleeping bag falls from my shoulder, I feel her pull it up and tuck it in around me.
Continue reading “Katy Trip Day 1 (Home – St. Charles)”

This summer, Mandy switched around her visit to Tulsa so that she could go to her Audubon camp.  That shifted the time we could set aside for a family vacation from super-hot early August to hopefully-nicer early June.

As a teenager, I rode parts of the Katy Trail in Missouri.  It’s about 250 miles of mostly-flat packed limestone gravel, running from St. Charles (just west of St. Louis) all the way across the state to Clinton, Missouri.  We’ve been wanting to ride the whole length of the trail as a family.  An early-June vacation seemed like a good time to give it a try.

Here’s a link to a map of the trail.

We bought a guidebook to the trail way back last year, and had been daydreaming over it ever since.  The Katy is the longest rail-trail in the US!  A landmark state park system!  With friendly little towns and ice cream shops and cyclist-centered campgrounds all along the way!  And historical thingamajigs!  All just one state north of us.

To make the trip a little more challenging (and fun), we decided to leave the car in Little Rock and do the whole eight-day vacation using alternative transportation.  We pieced together a route using mostly Amtrak, but also the public transit buses and light rail in St. Louis.  And, of course, the touring bikes.  It’ll be the longest trip any of us have ever taken by bike, and we’ll be doing it together.  With stops for ice cream.