Day 21: Kirksville, Missouri to Quincy, Illinois 93 miles. 2900 feet of climbing.

Today we finally got to say "goodbye" to the notorious hills of Northern Missouri.  But not before one last bastard of a morning full of more steep climbs.  The afternoon, on the other hand, was a beautiful biking day.

More barn art.  I spoke with the farmer who had just opened the doors to his barn.  This pattern is called the Missouri Puzzle pattern.  As there are still large populations of Amish in and around Baring, the town where this barn is, many folks, Amish and not, have decorated their barn sides or barn doors with quilt patterns.

Once again, we would be making a change in our travel route today.  The same rising waters that affected our crossing the Missouri were even more of a factor in crossing the Mississippi.  We normally would have crossed the Mississippi River in Canton, Missouri.  However, the ferry that America By Bike has been using for years is no longer in service.  And, even if it was, it would not have been able to be in use today due to the crested waters of the river.  Instead, we were diverted fourteen miles down river, where we were shuttled across to the Illinois side.  We were not allowed to ride over a very narrow and treacherous bridge with no shoulders and plenty of high-speed truck traffic.  

With all the rolling hills over the past four days, I've been seeing these signs as we approach the bottoms of many descents before climbing back up the other side.  What follows are things hard to imagine in sunny, warm weather.

This small river looks fairly innocuous.  Yet, in wet weather times, the water levels will rise fifteen to twenty feet.  And, from where I took this picture, that would barely keep me dry.

It's hard to believe that the little river in the picture above would have water levels that rise high enough to flood the cornfields from the first photo.  Yet, time and again, I passed these water gauges that are marking high water levels.  As I would see later this afternoon along the Mississippi, the waters do, in fact, rise that high.

It was another brisk and sunny morning as we left Kirksville.  This morning, we picked up where we left off with yesterday's severe hills.  It was all the talk last night at dinner and again today at the first SAG stop.  No time for our legs to recover and, to make matters worse, the alphabet roads we were on this morning were terribly paved, adding to both the difficulty in many of our climbs as well as the caution with which we rode over badly rutted pavement.

At one very steep climb, there was a cemetery at the top on the right hand side of the hill.  I took one look at the tombstones and immediately felt those were for all the dead cyclists who weren't able to make this particularly challenging climb.  This evening at dinner, when I recalled that thought to a couple of fellow riders, they all had the same reaction as I did upon surmounting that summit.  AND, it turned out that most of that climb was at a 14% grade.  However, the last one hundred feet or so was at a 17% gradient!  No wonder we all felt dead after reaching the top.

During one of the climbs, Ted, a fellow rider from Texas, and I were struggling to get up another steep hill.  Behind us, and patiently waiting to pass once he cleared the blind corner up ahead, was a farmer driving an enormous John Deere tractor.  It was the kind that had wheels over eight feet high.  I'm not sure if it's used for fertilizing or what, but it can straddle top corn plants.  Given the fact that it could also have straddled us and still had over a foot of clearance above our heads, Ted wondered why he didn't just drive over us instead of waiting to pass us.  

Once we hit the Mississippi River and had to detour south, Ted and Norm, two Texans from Austin (that's Ted giving the "hook 'em horns" sign) and I stopped off for lunch at a local cafe.  Again, really good food and folks with a great attitude and happy has hell to see us again this year.  They were most grateful for our patronage.  We were most grateful for their good food and restrooms!

For all the hills yesterday and this morning, it was still quite a change of pace this afternoon to ride on much flatter ground and a bit of shock to see how much the Mississippi had overflowed its banks.  We had come up to the river, then turned to the right, to head south for our river crossing another 14 miles downstream.  That put the Mississippi on our left.  Not only were parts of cornfields on the left side of the road totally under water but, in some parts of our detour, the floodplain had extended across the street to put parks and parking lots of buildings under water as well.  Had we tried to bike down this route yesterday, the river road would have been closed as it, too, was under water.

As we were riding to the south, the Mississippi was to our left.  This is a shot of one of the floodplains we passed.  What you see is water that's from the crested river.  The actual river is just beyond the trees in the background.  What you don't see are the Amtrak tracks.  In this section, they were totally covered up by the rising waters.  

This was shot from the van ferrying us across the river.  They would not let us ride on the elevated highway as it was both too narrow (no shoulders) and too busy with truck traffic to allow for cyclists.

After Gene dropped us off in a park in Quincy, on the other side of the river, I rode back down to the riverbank to take some shots of the Mississippi.  That's the bridge we were not allowed to cross on our bikes.  As I was taking this shot, I was told by a local that the river is 18 feet above normal.  The parking lot to the restaurant just to the right of from where I took this shot was totally under water.

Tomorrow, we'll ride a bit over one hundred miles to Springfield, Illinois, capital of Illinois and the home and final resting place of Abraham Lincoln.  And it'll be the 4th of July!  We're all wearing our red, white and blue bike jerseys in honor of the holiday.