Colorful Bracket Fungi in Morris State Park

Day 12 - I had a restless night with stomach problems and didn't get much sleep. I guess that's the price I pay as my body metamorphs into a traveling machine. Geri feels fine. She can eat hot, spicy, rich food, pedal the bike 50 miles and has no problems. On the other hand, if I eat just a small morsel of green pepper, I am in trouble! We didn't have very much dew, even though we were camped beside the lake, so we had a fast pack up, but we still didn't get away until 9:00 AM.  As I wrote before, that seems to be our departure niche every time we camp.  We had to push the bike up the very steep drive out of the campground, then we had the series of steep hills to climb leaving the Park, but we managed to pedal up all of those.  The largest one, that gave us problems yesterday, was now an exciting, fast downhill screamer that allowed us to reach 44.5 mi/hr!  Soon we were making good time as we made our way SE and left the Ozark hills behind.  Once on the level terrain of the Mississippi River bottoms, we often averaged 14 mi/hr for several miles.  We reached Morris State Park, our 46th Missouri state park, by mid-afternoon.  This is a small park that sits on top of Crowley's Ridge with a unique habitat supporting some plant and animal species found no where else in Missouri.  We hiked the 2 mile Beech Tree Trail, which is the only activity that this Park has to offer.  We continued pedaling to Campbell, MO. and treated ourselves to our 2nd motel stay on the trip after traveling over 60 miles and averaged an excellent (for us) 12.4 mi/hr.  A laundromat was conveniently located right next door to the motel, so Geri did the wash and I rode the bike to get dinner.  Clean clothes, full bellies, no rain, no flat tires and a real bed for tonight-------Things are pretty good!!