Cutting Off the Tails: We’re Done
We awoke early on the last day of our trip hoping to outwait
the thunderstorm coming in from the Southwest (the exact direction we were
going to be riding into Clinton, Mo.) We walked .7 miles to breakfast at the
Sunrise Café in light sprinkles but walked back to the hotel with rain coming
down.
Around 10am, we pulled the plug on riding that day and
declared our bike trip at the end. We
were a little disappointed, but since we had already ridden the trail from
Clinton to Sedalia on the outbound leg of our trip we felt we had pretty much
accomplished the ride. We just cut off the tails of our out and back Katy
Trail ride by forgoing the 12.5 miles after St. Charles (because of the report
of goat heads/puncture vines) and by not riding the 35 miles from Sedalia
back to Clinton.
Our stats proved we had aptly named our ride the “Slow Me
Tour.” We traveled the 401 mile
roundtrip in 50 hours of riding – an average of 8 miles per hour. Still we did the ride and learned a few more
lessons on how to best tackle gravel/crushed limestone, concluding the magic
number for fully loaded gravel bikes is somewhere between 35 to 38 miles a
day. This doesn’t seem like much but
when you pretty much pedal every foot of 35 to 38 miles you get a good
workout. And four to five hours a day in
the saddle on gravel/crushed limestone surface is probably enough. But lest you think we are discouraged by our
efforts we are already contemplating our next trip http://www.mickelsontrailaffiliates.com/ J Rob and Diane
....but the taxi did not come, so we walked to breakfast and walked back to the hotel in the rain (note Diane's fashionable bread sack rain hat).
We tried to wait out the rain.... but to no avail. Our ride was done.
So we leave you our "selfie" on the Missouri River Bridge.
Happy Trails......................
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