Tried to get off early to make it to the end of the Katy trail. After a short ride to Boonville, crossing the Missouri for the last time, we stopped for breakfast at the Riverside Diner. Huge cinnamon buns, full of all our required nutrients, caught our eye, as did the "Open" sign on a Sunday morning in rural America.
The ride got a wee bit hillier after that, which was actually a welcome change because it gave us something to focus on. We saw a probably rabid racoon that was wide awake in the middle of the road and acting slightly bizarre, even guilty (it's probably the one that's been following us across from the East and eating our food). The day was really starting to heat and humid up like it had not in quite some time.
We made it to Sedalia, home of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art (which we didn't visit, but just so you know). Here we were to make a decision, whether to finish out the trail in Clinton today and then plan our route to rejoin our TransAm colleagues or to head strait out from there and possibly through Kansas City. Luckily, I think, we ran into the owner of one of the bike shops, who told us that a ride on Rt. 50 to Kansas City wasn't bad, big shoulders, and that he used to ride it to visit his gal all the time in college.
Taking his advice, we headed onto hot, steamy, rt. 50, being thrown back into a suburban sprawl environment on a 4 lane highway was a little jarring (esp. because there wasn't a shoulder through town) and we were hungry (and I can be less than pleasant when hungry). We had resigned ourselves almost to eating at Denny's or the like, when we stumbled upon the Brick Oven serving up delicious meditteranean food. I had actually had a dream with chickpeas in it the night before, so this was the perfect answer, and they had a dozen kinds of homemade cheesecake. We limited ourselves to only sampling one. One of the guys behind the counter told us that he knew a lot of people that won't eat there because the food is, well, not meat and potatos they are used to.
Unfortunately the day did not get any less hot, and suddenly it was 100 degrees, we were out on the pavement and having to stop every 10 miles max just to keep our heads cool, down some electrolytes, put on new sunscreen and regroup. People told us we were insane to be biking in this weather and we agreed completely with them. Also we were on a hunt for a Kansas map, which we had yet to find.
When we did come upon one we were slightly depressed to find that the best possible route for us might have been to continue on our shaded Katy! GRRRR. It took us a good few miles to get over that. We searched for routees and decided the best bet was not to go to Kansas City, but to Warrensburg for the night, and then continue onwards into Kansas the following day.
Andy called the local police to see if we could camp in there city park, and after some polite "no's" we realized (with mixed emotions) that we would have to spend the night in a motel, fortunately we found a pretty cheap Days Inn, cleaned up our bikes, cleaned up ourselves, ordered really good Italian food, and went to sleep. Soundly. We set ourselves to get up very early so we could try to beat the heat that had attacked us fiercely this day.
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