day 12: union city to cape girardeau, missouri 91 miles

hot, humid, windy and very long.  oh yeah, and a ferry crossing.

knowing that we had to make a ferry crossing early in the morning, we were all out on the road before our usual 7:00 or 7:30 am.  dan, rollie, bill and i, along with a couple of the other "slower" riders, left breakfast by 6:20 am.  the fossils decided to hold back until 6:45 before getting on the road.  our collective goal was to make the ferry crossing at hickman, kentucky, by 8:00 am.  to get there, we had to cover just shy of 19 miles of rolling hills.  dan, rollie, bill and i did that averaging 14.9 miles per hour (which included having to double back due to a wrong turn around the eight mile mark).  the fossils covered that same distance averaging 19 miles per hour.

just entering kentucky before the ferry ride

as with days in louisiana, cargill grain facilities dot the waterfront landscape

our route this morning took us through more tennessee cornfields before cutting into the tiniest sliver of kentucky's southwestern border, in the town of hickman.  from there, we boarded the riverboat ferry for the ten minute trip over to  missouri.  by the time we boarded the ferry at 8:00 am, the temperature was already at 87 degrees and promising to get much warmer as the day grew on.

our waterway transportation

starting to load up

getting all the riders on board so we could load the support vans

all packed in.  regular car and truck passengers as well

once on the missouri side, we again were riding through corn, alfalfa, wheat and rice fields.  i'm getting pretty good at identifying the various crops in the region and am getting quite an education from rollie, who lived on a farm growing up in iowa, and doug, who owns a couple of farms in oklahoma and texas, as to which crops are nitrogen producing and which are nitrogen depleting and why all that matters.  i'll save you all that lesson for another time (i can hear the cheering in the background).

the first official state sign welcoming us since we started this trip

by 10:30, we were parched, tired and hungry, so about 10 of us popped into a mcdonald's along interstate 55 in charlestown.  inside, we wolfed down some more eggs and biscuits and washed them down with mango/pineapple or strawberry/banana smoothies.  actually, they were quite tasty.  while inside, an enthusiastic woman came up to us and asked if we were training for "the tour."  to a cyclist, "the tour" only means one thing...the tour de france.  however, using whatever wisdom remained in our tired bodies, a couple of us asked the woman which tour she was referring to.  "why, the tour de corn, of course," she replied.  turns out, around the 4th of july there in charlestown, missouri, there's a very popular one-day bike event called, yes, "the tour de corn."  it includes a 25-, 50-, and 100-mile ride through the southeast missouri countryside.  she was so excited to tell us all about it, even when we tried our best to explain that, one, we weren't from around there and, two, we were on our way to minnesota and probably wouldn't be back there anytime soon.  still, she was very kind and wished us all well.

the rest of the day was spent hydrating as often as humanly possible, climbing some inhuman hills, and trying to survive both the heat and the winds.  everyone felt depleted of energy by the time we got into today's stop.  but everyone finished.

for much of the day in missouri after the ferry ride, we were battling strong, westerly and southwesterly winds that were either direct headwinds or cross winds that dramatically slowed our progress.  at our backs, those winds would help us do a comfortable 18-20 mph pace.  in our faces, we were lucky enough to average 12 mph.  from the side, the winds would slow our progress down to 14-15 mph.  for about seven miles, as we battled the strong crosswinds, we tried a maneuver used by professional racing teams.  it's called an echelon.  similar to the formations that geese use when flying together, we rode four across on the relatively deserted county road in a formation with each rider situated at the 4:00 o'clock position of the back wheel of the rider in front of him.  again, as is the case with the single-file pace line, the lead rider takes the brunt of the winds, but all the other riders benefit by not having to fight as hard to pedal.  and, as with the pace line, we each took turns leading.  it made those seven miles go a lot faster than if we would have ridden in single file formation.

once we got into the hills, we lost the winds, but had to deal with sharp, steep rollers.  and, all the while, dealing with the heat.  i don't know if you can make it out, but the shot below, of day's ride elevations, shows a couple of seriously short, steep climbs during the latter portion of the ride.  at this point, we've been beaten up by the winds, and had been dealing with the energy-sapping heat.  while we aren't talking about climbs into the rocky mountains, short, steep rollers can be a nightmare on a long day's ride.  in two cases today, we had a 10% and at 15% grade climb (rollie and steve have garmins, so we know exactly the degree of incline while we're climbing).  they don't get much steeper than that.

that 15% climb was a killer

but the heat was really the final blow for many.  at one point, my bike computer registered a temperature of 106 degrees.  while that's more from the road surface than the ambient air temperature, it was still ridiculously hot.

heat like today had strong effects on many of the riders.  some were broken and reduced to slow climbs up hills that, in previous days, they would have attacked.  others needed multiple stops every five miles or so to catch their breath, to rest or merely to regain composure.

as for tomorrow, it's only supposed to get worse.  today cape girardeau set a record high temperature of 98 degrees.  and tomorrow, they are predicting even higher temperatures. fortunately, it's only a 70 mile ride tomorrow.