Day 18 (August 29): Ozarks

Kathleen and I set out this morning from our motel, only to discover that her front wheel was all bent out of shape from a fall late yesterday. Fortunately, her folks were on their way into the vicinity. We had a barbecue lunch and met up with her parents. Mark and I set off in the drizzle for Eminence, MO, and the official TransAmerica bicycle route (plotted out by the Adventure Cycling Association). Kathleen and her mom Elizabeth went to Poplar Bluff to get a new wheel and talk about Tyler Hansbrough. I realized that Kathleen and I had only been through some hiccoughs of the Ozarks so far, as Mark and I really started into some longer climbs. Since I had dumped my big packs into Mark and Elizabeth's vehicle, I felt like I was flying. The cloud cover and rain kept the temperature down, and our ride through another pocket of the Mark Twain National Forest was lovely. We made it a short day with 32 miles and had lunch in Eminence. I'm still trying to sort out Missouri - people are a little less inclined to wave at us, I've seen many, many Confederate flags (Samuel Clemens himself was a Confederate soldier for a while), but riding through the flood plain of the Mississippi seemed like a hint of the Great Plains to come. It seems like an odd conglomeration of all of these different parts of the surrounding US (on the surface, at least). I can't quite figure out a category for it.