I checked into a hotel in Marshall, MO at about 9am and spent the day there, watching the weather. Most of the roads out of town were closed due to flooding. I was stuck for now. At least this meant I got a legitimate day of rest. I didn’t leave the hotel room except to grab food across the street.
I had planned to meet up with my friends Emily and David (the ones who got married in Iowa City earlier that month). We talked about meeting up in St. Louis, but I happened to get there the same weekend as their friend’s birthday party. So we changed our plans to meet up in or around Kansas City. My map didn’t have me go into the city proper. They have friends in the city however, so they came early to spend time with friends from college and their baby. I called to give them an update. I definitely wasn’t going to make it to our rendezvous point. They had a car, so we arranged our plans to meet in Marshall the next morning. I warned them about the flooding and told them to turn around if there was any danger, but for the most part it didn’t rain that morning. I waited in a coffee shop in the town square and wrote postcards until they arrived. We stopped by the Jim the Wonder Dog Memorial and chatted with the locals until their friends showed up. Together we explored the memorial and learned how awesome Jim the Wonder Dog was. He could follow complicated commands so well it seemed like he understood English. The ultimate good boy.
Next we went to the Nicholas-Beasley Aviation Museum. I hadn’t planned to go to either place, but we had a whole lot of fun exploring the exhibits and snapping photos. On the way out of town we grabbed some BBQ. Emily and David’s friends generously let me sleep at their house so I didn’t have to pay for a hotel. I was most excited just to spend time with familiar people for the first time in weeks. I knew it would be the last time I would talk to people I knew, face to face, for at least a month. I was well fed that night, and again for breakfast, and over the course of the evening, I studied the map to see what roads were closed due to flooding. It looked like if I went back to Marshall I wouldn’t be able to get to my next destination due to closures. I wound up finding a hotel in Richmond, MO and had them drop me off there so I wouldn’t be stranded.
David agreed to take me to the Lewis and Clark Memorial, atop a hill in Kansas City before we went to my next hotel. I may have been a bit obsessed with this sculpture, as it featured not just, Lewis, Clark and Seaman, the dog, but Sacagawea, baby Jean-Baptiste and York, the core cast of the Corps of Discovery. Emily took a picture of me and Sea from every angle and I got a selfie with the two of us.
The ground was fully saturated, so, while the rain was off and on, every extra inch meant more road closures and more trying to find a way west that wasn’t the submerged route on my map. I rode through fields that had become ponds, by culverts that were full to the brim with water. I watched the weather closely. After that first night of flooding and being woken up in my tent to an emergency situation, I was increasingly wary of staying at a campground. I didn’t want to be washed out. It kept on raining on and off, and I got constant emergency warnings on my phone. Flash flooding, river flooding, general flooding. All of them lasted at least the next 24 hours but the end time kept getting pushed further and further out. It felt like the flood waters were closing in on me. My options for which roads I could take and where I could stay were increasingly limited.
I slept that night in another hotel, this time in Kearney, MO. My wallet and my financial conscience were beginning to hurt from the number of hotels I’d had to stay at in a row—and sleeping in a soft, dry bed so many nights in a row would make it all the more difficult to convince myself to stay in a campground when all this rain ended. That morning I stayed in a coffeeshop til late morning, waiting for the downpour to break enough for me to bike. The rain was blinding. I managed to catch up on last week’s blog and I stopped by Jesse James’s grave on my way out of town. I headed north to Smithville Lake.
When I got to Smithville Lake I finally hit a bike path and enjoyed smooth riding for a mile or two. I was going to stop at a Subway in Smithville for lunch and then continue on. The sidewalk was practically brand new, so I was horrified when I heard the hiss of a flat tire. What could I have possibly run over? There was nothing there! And of course it started raining again as i stopped to change my inner tube. When I was in Iowa City, I wanted them to replace both tires. I definitely needed to replace one, but I knew the other one wasn’t much longer for this world. With the mileage that I’ve been riding and the weight on my bike, tires wear out much more quickly than they would at home. But there’s a tire shortage right now and the bike shop didn’t have a second that was the right size. I let it go, figuring I’d just get another tire in Omaha. I was miffed that I’d gotten a flat though, and when I went to replace the tube I was in a flat out rage. The guy who tuned up my bike in Iowa City had taken out the puncture resistant strips inside of the tire and didn’t replace them. He didn’t tell me any of this. Honestly, it was hard enough to get him to tell me he replaced my brakes. I had paid for those strips back in Boston to prevent unnecessary flats like the one I’d just gotten. They were meant to increase the life of my tires, but they were just gone.
Replacing the tire meant taking off all of my gear, removing my bike rack so I could take out the wheel, taking off the entire tire, putting the new tube in, being careful not to pinch it and cause a puncture, and then putting the whole thing back together, filling it with air from a hand pump (which in itself is exhausting) then getting the whole rig back together and reloading my bags. It was exhausting, both physically and emotionally. All of this, and I had been trying to get to lunch when all this happened. I was starving. I decided to call it a day, wanted to stay in Smithville, but the hotel was fully booked. This part of Missouri was pretty hilly and all the energy had now been sucked out of me. I found a hotel within ten miles because of course it was raining still and it was meant to rain all night and into the morning. More flood warnings, more flash flood warnings.
I stayed somewhere as cheap as i could find, just north of Kansas City again. The next day I crossed the river into Kansas for the first time. I stayed in Leavenworth at a hotel that used to be a Catholic school. There were hotel rooms built into the old gymnasium. My room was an old classroom. My morale was sinking deeper and deeper with all of this rain. Every single day on the forecast had said rain with no signs of sunshine for the past. There was no sign of it ending. Everywhere I went there was more water. So, when I got to Fort Leavenworth in an attempt to see the Frontier Army Museum and found out I needed a visitors pass to see it—and that it wasn’t open that day, I gave up. It poured again all evening and all night.
The next day the rain finally stopped. The flash flood warnings ended.
(credit to my friend Michelle Ross for the punny title)
The Stars On the Horizon 