Day 26: Allerton, MO to Milan, MO

July 11, 2012

The End.

(By Joy)

Here's the thing about bicycle touring in this kind of heat. It's hot. You get up in the morning and hope it's cooler, but it's still around 80 degrees and muggy. All the old men at the gas station where you've stopped to get ice for the day's ride are saying, “Gonna be another hot one” and talking about how they've never seen a summer like this. You feel bad for feeling bad for yourself because, technically, you're on vacation, and they're watching much of their annual income dry up in the fields just outside of town. Some of them are talking about just plowing it under instead of harvesting it because there's so little usable crop in many of their fields.

The daily ritual application of sunscreen becomes a dreaded necessity since you've seen hardly a cloud in the sky for weeks. Soon, rivulets of it will be running down your face anyway, and what's on your arms and legs will become a slimy, sweaty mess, no matter how “sweatproof” the bottle says it is. If there's been a dry wind, though, it may become a chalky mess instead. Just to mix it up. Reapplying it during the day becomes a disgusting task as it feels like you're just spreading sweat around on your face and not accomplishing much. The taste of sunscreen-infused sweat becomes familiar. The backs of your knees stick and unstick themselves from your legs with every pedal stroke, and you constantly feel like a big slimeball. Sweat pools in uncomfortable places, and you gave up on deodorant weeks ago since it only works for about 10 minutes in the morning, anyway.

The night before in Allerton, I drank a 16 oz slushie, half a gallon of iced tea, a 32 oz Powerade, a 20 oz diet Pepsi or two, 2 bottles of water, and a bottle of chocolate milk before I felt anything close to caught-up on liquids. That's three trips to the gas station in a 3 hour period.

Leaving Allerton, we had a nice morning—slightly cooler—and a little bit of a tailwind (rare when going south in the summer) to push us toward Missouri. We had stocked up on ice before leaving—every water bottle was filled with it, and we had two additional bottles frozen solid in the Inn's little fridge, so Jeff's bike was a bit heavier than usual, but the route was fairly flat, so it didn't seem to affect him much.

We made really good time in the morning. I knew we would have to so we could get to Milan, the next town with a motel about 65 miles from Allerton. We were going through only one town the whole day—Powersville, about 24 miles into the day. We didn't think there would be any services there, but as we sat in the town park eating and drinking from our little cooler, some Amish boys went into a dark storefront and came out with cold drinks, so we ventured over there and found a little tiny store where I drank down another Gatorade and bought 10 more pounds of ice to refill bottles and the cooler. We adjusted our route a bit leaving town to try for a shortcut the storekeeper lady recommended, but it turned out to be a very hilly road, so we opted to get back on our original route. It still had some climbing, but it followed a ridgeline part of the time, so the climbs were smaller except where the road crossed streams and rivers.

We were also hoping to find more shade on our original route, but there wasn't much to be had. After Jeff's run in with the guy who told us to get off his property a few days ago, we were a little hesitant to get under trees on people's property, but we needed the shade and figured we could leave quickly if someone asked us to. As the day got later, the sun got higher and we (primarily me) had to stop more often. The heat seems to have a cumulative effect throughout the day, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky to stop the sun from beating down on us, and I began to question what we were doing outside in this horrid heat day after day after day.

From a touring perspective, the heat is bad physically, of course, though, the mental part can be hard, too. Every decision you make is based, at least in part, on the thermometer—how early to get up, how hard to ride, and how many miles, of course, but also whether you have time to stop and look at interesting things and talk to (potentially) interesting people. Towns you may have spent some time exploring before become just another gas station to use as a watering hole. Restaurants where you might have stopped for breakfast or for pie are passed by because the service is likely to be slow and you can't afford to sit around while the temperature rises. You start looking for shortcuts instead of taking the low-traffic roads you'd mapped out in an effort to get to towns faster and get inside for some relief.

We've been rewriting lyrics to all sorts of songs the past few days trying to keep a bit of humor despite the heat and lack of shade in many places. We have all sorts of profane lyrics for various songs—notably, a dirty-words version of “Here Comes the Sun” that we never completely finished.

Just before Milan, Missouri, I finally gave up on this tour being anything resembling fun. The heat, even though we'd been dealing with it for weeks, finally got to me and wouldn't let go. I finally admitted to myself and then to Jeff that I wasn't having much fun at all except for the first hour of the day when it was slightly less hot. The rest of the day was a necessary evil—just moving forward to get to the next air conditioned stop.

I just wasn't feeling so good and had to stop about every mile if there was shade, even though we were just a few miles from town. As I was sitting under a shade tree wondering if I could actually make it the last few miles into town without my splitting headache turning into something worse, I told Jeff, “This is a stupid way to have fun.” Not bicycle touring in general, but this particular tour. It's gotten to the point that we're missing most of the good parts of bicycle touring without getting many of the rewards. We went through over 20 pounds of ice today and could have used another 10 pounds if we could have gotten it somewhere.

We know now that there's no break coming in the heat between now and the end of our tour. St. Louis continues to have temps above 100 degrees, and more are in the forecast. They're already calling out the Iowa Air National Guard to help with RAGBRAI in Iowa next week—providing tankers of water and such to cyclists (they're usually there to promote the guard anyway, but they're preparing more water than usual). If you're in an area where the National Guard is being mobilized to keep cyclists from keeling over, maybe it's time to just go home and try again another day. So that's what we're doing. Going home.

We made it to Milan, but I couldn't figure out where we'd come into town relative to where the nearest gas station was, but Jeff asked for directions and got us headed in the right way. We stood in the corner of Casey's downing liquid, bought 3 liters of diet Pepsi and a thing of iced tea for later, and went to the not-so-clean Motel Milan and decided that our tour was over. I told Jeff he could finish the trip if he wanted to. The route I'd made was a good one without much traffic, and he was handling the heat better than I was, but we've been in this together the whole way, so we're going to quit together, too. We've ridden in temperatures near or above 100 most days of this trip—nearly a month. If we'd had a couple days with lower temps or even with a decent amount of cloud cover, I probably could have kept it together and kept going long enough to get on the Katy Trail. But the relentlessness of what we've been riding in, especially since we need to get in AC at night to sleep enough to deal with the heat the next day, has finally worn me down.

Tomorrow morning, Jeff's riding to a nearby town with a U-Haul place. We'll rent our second truck of this trip and fast forward all the way home to our air conditioner, our own bed, our comfy couches, and our readily available washer and dryer. I won't have to feel like a slimeball every day, and we can start picking out paint and carpet to make our new house our own.

And just maybe we'll do a nice autumn tour of the Katy Trail when the temperatures drop a few dozen degrees...