Next State Over

 

We had to go to Missouri. We had no choice its right next to Nebraska, and blocks the way to the great river road, where we are planning a ride north into hopefully cooler temperatures.

I began to get nervous as we approached to border, because the closer we got the people seemed to get larger, and I am sure they had less teeth (but I did not check), and once crossing over I began to see numerous shrines to pensetrump some quite elaborate, and bordering on a expression of folk art.

Folk Art or Insanity

The best one was three large plastic elephants, draped with pencetrump banners, flags, and trump 2024 campaign pennants. I guess they found someone worse than pence for 2024?

Since Ohms is down with communication with my phone for music, calls, and text messages, I downloaded the motor company app that apparently sends routes that you can easily create to a singular destination This proved way better than trying to program the navigation on the bike with your finger, and the app works about 85% of the time.

The app also comes with rides from the motor company in it, and one of these is the Bagnell Dam Loop.

This ride seemed like the best thing going in Missouri, so ii sent it to Ohms and off we went through some rural farmland, around sweeping tree lined corners, and up and down the rolling hills. This is a great ride, it is a lot cooler under the cover of trees, and if you are aware you miss all the turtles in the road like we did.

Look Out Turtle

The app got us to the dam, but that was it. No return loop. No nothing, so it was back to celestial navigation to get us back up to Columbia, and the exit road for Missouri.

On the way to Columbia we passed a new motor company outpost, and did a turn around so as to get points in the app. And at Columbia we discovered that you could keep revisiting the same outpost and get points daily. Such rich knowledge.

Finally out of Missouri and on the famous River Road

On The River

This is a great ride! Mostly rural country that parallels the river for some of the time, drops down into some major port cities, and carries on north back through the countryside.

In Alton Illinois  as we approached a major intersection the road was awash in water. My first thought was the dam had broken and we were about to be carried away on the raging flood waters of the once mighty Mississippi. But Alas it was only a McDonalds restaurant fully ablaze and being extinguished by the local Fire Department.

Would You Like Fries With That?

Up in Dubuque Iowa at the express hotel, I had the worse hotel breakfast of the entire trip. To go bags of muffins, cereal bars, and porridge. No protein at all, and way below the standards of this chain.

Further fussing with the motor company app reveled that the only way to build a route/ride that would keep you on a two-lane road was to create a GPX file, and then import that to Ohms.

Hours later after earning my master’s degree on GPX files from Google University I created and imported my first route.

Making Maps

It was almost perfect. It kept us on the river road all the way to Red Wing Minnesota, where we wanted to go, and where they make Red Wing Shoes. The only problem was I failed to edit the waypoints that the map program inserted, and had to delete them on the road…

Thanks for reading…