Day 38 - It was so warm last night that I had to sleep on top of my sleeping bag half the night, but the morning temperature was very pleasant. We had our usual slow pack up and got on the road at 9:15 AM. All the hills we had to climb to get to the campground yesterday were now steep gravity friendly screamers and we exited Trail of Tears State Park in short order. We are now traveling in a pretty hilly area of Missouri, but Hwy 177 did a good job missing any big grades. We stopped for a big breakfast just before reaching Hwy 61. I had originally planned to be on Hwy 61 for only a short while, then take a series of country roads to weave our way to Sainte Genevieve, MO., but when we started pedaling NW on Hwy 61 we decided to continue traveling on it. The traffic volume was low and it had a fair 3 foot wide shoulder. It was also a more direct route to our goal for the night and it saved us about 10 miles. We traveled NW on Hwy 61 with moderate rolling hill terrain and nothing of any special interest until the road leveled off a few miles SE of Sainte Genevieve and we pedaled on the western edge of the Mississippi River floodplain. There were rock cliffs to our left and the flat, wide floodplain to our right. We reached a nice motel on the western edge of Sainte Genevieve at 5:15 PM after covering over 60 miles and averaging over 11 mi/hr. We settled into the comfort of what will probably be our last motel stay on this trip, unless the weather changes drastically. The long range forecast is for continued amazingly good October weather, however, so we could be home by Friday!
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| The Mississippi River floodplain SE of Sainte Genevieve, MO. |
Guys, the photo you labeled Mississippi River flood plain SE of Sainte Genevieve Missouri is actually Kaskaskia Island, Illinois. The water you see is the old Mississippi River channel before the river cut off the bend and went straight, putting the town of Kaskaskia, Illinois, once the state capital, on the Missouri side of the river. Most of the old channel is now dry. There are about 30 residents of Kaskaskia today. They have to drive quite a ways to get to the rest of their state (south on 61 to Route H, south on H to Highway 51 and then north on 51 to the Mississippi River bridge at Chester, Illinois. Keep up the bicycling, I really enjoy the trip, vicariously of course.
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