Bicycling road hazards!

Natural Love Seat

Dennis & Geri caught between 2 elephants!

Our 42th Missouri State Park by bicycle

Day 6 - We both woke up before 6:00 AM, but a drizzle kept us inside the tent until nearly 7:30 AM.  We still managed to get away by 9:00 AM which seems to be our usual time of departure most days no matter what happens.  It was a rough ride to Potosi, MO.  The traffic was moderately heavy with big trucks and many cars.  I selected the backroads to Potosi to avoid the traffic on Hwy 21, even though I knew we would have more hills, but now we had both with no shoulder!  We saw another Copperhead on the road before arriving at Potosi where we resupplied at a grocery store before heaing south on Hwy 21.  We stopped for a chicken lunch special at Caledonia, MO. and then had a great ride to Elephant Rocks State Park on nice, smooth, safe shoulders with fewer hills that were easier to climb.  We hiked the Braille Trail in Elephant Rocks and enjoyed the giant boulders with both of us wishing we had our grandchildren there to share the adventure with them.  Unfortunately, Geri's phone went completely dead on the hike, even though it was fully charged.  We are heading into a part of Missouri where we will not find any Verizon stores and we might not even be able to get a cellular phone signal, so we were pretty frustrated to have a phone only one month old that stopped working and a new blog that would stop completely after just 1 week!  We continued on to Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park on Route N and had the best pedaling time on the entire trip so far.  It was surprising level and there were a lot of gradual downhill sections that allowed us to travel over 20 mi/hr. effortlessly!  We reached the Park soon after 6:00 PM.  This is a HUGE state park that has several hundred campsites and they are all brand new.  A few years ago, Taum Sauk Dam broke and destroyed the original campground.  It has all been rebuilt now and we were one of just a few campers in the entire Park!  We set up our tent and cooked our 1st meal on the entire trip before getting to bed after pedaling 57.5 miles today and averaging nearly 11 mi/hr.  The last 10 miles on Route N really boosted our average speed!