Day Nine: Windsor, Missouri to Harrisonville, Missouri

September 20, 2022

I was antsy and ready to ride after yesterday's day off the bike. I turned on the television in my room - first time I've done that on this tour - and found a local weather forecast. The weatherman confirmed that the high temperature today would likely break the record - it would reach 99F or maybe even 100. Too hot for me to ride much into the afternoon, and certainly too hot to sleep in a tent. I require either optimum conditions to tent camp, or a desperate situation in which there are absolutely no other options.

I looked at the map on my laptop, and saw that there was a cheap old motel 56 miles west just off I-49, and that I could ride 40 miles on the Rock Island Spur trail (an offshoot of the Katy Trail) and then 17 miles on what appeared to be mostly empty country roads to reach it. After that? I'd think about it tomorrow, but my vague idea was to ride west across Kansas for a while.

I was out and riding just before 7:00. I turned onto the Rock Island Spur of the Katy Trail, which is a newer section of trail than the original Katy.

What are these birds? Wild turkeys? It's not a great picture, because they ran (and flew, a little) from me quickly.

The trail continued to be pleasant if unexciting. The scenery that I glimpsed through gaps in the tunnel of trees were mostly hay fields.

After 10 miles I stopped briefly in Leeton, population 566. Looking at Google Maps now, I see that there are a few potentially interesting things in the town- a café, a bar and grill - but the trail skirts the very southern edge of the town, and I didn't see any of that. Instead I stopped at the trailhead and applied sunblock while simultaneously attempting to scrape off the many spiderwebs that I'd ridden through on the trail. Yuck.

All the Katy Trail trailheads contain information on the little towns you pass through. The Leeton trailhead, in addition to a (modest) list of noteworthy people from the town, included this sort of creepy story:

I didn't spend much more time in Leeton, although there was a house near the trailhead that I briefly inspected.

Chilhowee, population 325, and about ten miles up the trail from Leeton, was more interesting.

I was gratified to find that the little community store in the otherwise mostly abandoned downtown was open. I went in and purchased a Diet Coke, and, in a rare snack-acquisition-misstep, a packet of Hostess donuts that contained coconut. I hate coconut, but ate the donuts anyway. I sometimes tell my wife that the "rules are different" on bicycle tours; this is a prime example of the divergence of regular life and touring life. In regular life I would have angrily discarded a mistakenly purchased food item containing coconut.

There was a very, very large man in the store who was eager to engage me in conversation. He asked me if I'd ever done RAAM (the insanely difficult Race Across America bicycle race that elite athletes complete in nine or ten days.) I laughed and told him that I was a recreational cyclist, not an athlete. I was surprised he'd even heard of the race - he didn't look at all like the type of person who was interested in cycling - but he told me his college roommate had competed in the race.

He told me many other things, including the diet he was on that had enabled him to go down two pants sizes in the last month (salads from Aldi.) I nodded along for a while, but eventually told him I had to get back on the road before it became impossibly hot.

Back to the trail. I was grateful for the shady sections. I'd be on country roads soon, and wouldn't have the tunnel of trees anymore.

At my last stop on the trail, at the Medford trailhead, I encountered an unusual group of touring cyclists. They were five or six young men dressed in long jeans and regular shirts and shoes. They looked, and were dressed, like young farmers. They were riding unloaded bikes of various types, and told me that they had a support van following them, and had come out from where they lived in Ohio to ride the length of the Katy Trail. The leader of the group had apparently toured in this fashion all over the country. Interesting.

I left the trail and rode onto Missouri gravel and chip seal roads. I was happy to see some different scenery after the last several samey days.

Traffic on the 15 miles of country roads was very light, and reasonably well-behaved, but of course this *was* Missouri where the pickup truck-driving-rednecks are a more aggressive variety than the ones we have in Kentucky, so I kept a close watch on my helmet mounted mirror.

The last 0.7 miles to my motel at the I-49 interchange was a little hectic, but nothing I haven't done many times while touring. The motel itself was what I expected: Old and in need of maintenance, but clean-ish, and conveniently located across the road from a big truck stop, which I was gratified to discover contained a "Dunkin'", the apparently recently shortened name of the chain that used to be called "Dunkin' Donuts".

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Today's ride: 56 miles (90 km)
Total: 625 miles (1,006 km)

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