If I haven’t mentioned before, I bought a tracking device called Tracki solely to put my parents minds at ease, so they could know where I was when I didn’t have cell service to text them. While biking I realized pretty quickly that the device didn’t work as I intended. First of all it used cell service to triangulate my location. No cell service meant no location. Second of all, it was meant to automatically update every half hour. It very rarely did. So, I did some more research and invested in a more expensive GPS tracker that uses satellites so it would actually serve my intended function. It wasn’t going to be long before I reached parts of the country with limited service. I rushed out to Saint Louis first thing in the morning. I had my new tracker shipped to a post office in Saint Louis which closed at noon on Saturday. So, I booked it and picked it up from a very confused postal worker who asked me how I knew I could even have it sent there. It seems to be more of a think cyclists do in small towns, not major cities.
Somehow, my friend Christine managed to find me a place to stay through a work friend of hers named Brendan. He was out of town and generously lent me his apartment for the weekend. It was crazy how hospitable he was, even absent. He left me a note with dining suggestions, a neat stack of towels and a freshly laundered bed to sleep in. He even went to the grocery store and asked if I wanted anything. I asked for fresh fruit, since that’s rare on the trail, and he left me a bag of apples.
On my day off I went to the Saint Louis Zoo after a coffee at a place down the street called Kitchen House Coffee. I wound up spending the whole morning watching animals. First of all, they had prairie dogs. Prairie dog towns are my happy place, and I don’t know when I’m finally gonna start seeing them in the wild. Likely not until I hit the Dakotas. They had tables with umbrellas right across from the enclosure, so i grabbed a frappacinno and spent …gosh, at least an hour there. I saw camels, giraffes, rhinos, you name it, and as I left I wandered into the dinosaur exhibit which I quickly became obsessed with. I’d seen something like this advertised in Boston before. They had animatronic dinosaurs set up to look like a small Jurassic Park. Some of them had a water feature and spit cold water at patrons. Mixed in with these robotic creatures were a few live animals. I saw sleeping Tasmanian devils. I’d decided to see this exhibit because I knew that’s where the otters were hidden away. Unfortunately all otters do is nap, eat, and play before they nap again. It was not close to feeding time, so the critters were hiding somewhere taking a nap.
The zoo in Saint Louis is contained inside of Forest Park, a giant park spiderwebbed with walking bike paths, ponds, water features. That’s also where the Missouri History Museum was. For the second time on my journey, a history museum featured an intersectional exhibit on Women’s Suffrage. It was interesting to see such a different approach to the subject matter. Yet again bicycles were mentioned as a symbol of womens liberation. It’s nice to think that my biking across the country has greater meaning than the literal journey. Almost everyone asks me if I’m biking with someone when I tell them about my trip. I understand their concerns, but I’m pretty sure I’ve proven I don’t need a chaperone.
I saw an exhibit on Saint Louis history, including a portrait of William Clark that is featured on the cover of one of the biographies I’ve read, and a little room set up to show what his office looked like, with Native American items and portraits on the walls. Finally, I saw an exhibit about the World’s Fair before I moved on to the Gateway Arch. I saw the arch at a distance as I was biking into the city. Beneath it there’s a museum on Westward Expansion. It covers the city’s early history and includes a section on exploration of the West that heavily features the Lewis and Clark Expedition. One feature that I hadn’t expected but really loved, was how accessible they made the exhibits. Nearly every station had a bronze, scaled down reproduction of the items on display, so blind people could experience the exhibits.
I left Saint Louis later in the day than I had planned. Considering how generous my host had been, I made sure to wash my towels and sheets to make my presence as little an inconvenience as possible. I left a thank you bottle of wine in his fridge. There was only a bit more to bike before I was on the official Adventure Cycling Association’s Lewis and Clark Trail and could start using my paper maps and the GPS files I’d purchased. It began just over 20 miles north, in Hartford, IL, across the river from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
The Stars On the Horizon 