Day 32: Chillicothe to Kirksville MO

The show me state was showing off today.

Wildflowers were blooming like mad on an incredibly beautiful and extremely hilly 85 mile ride. Green pasture land, flower coated hillsides and farms with stately old white houses and occasional crumbling barns just kept coming all day. We were on narrow country roads. Flowers lined the road and coated fields - many which looked like mottled patches of green, red and yellow.

Lots of new wildflowers out today: yellow snap dragons, pink echinasia, and many others in purples, pinks and yellows.

The morning light and sky were beautiful and lasted much longer than usual making it a great morning for photography. The sky and clouds were layered with white fluffy clouds, some heavier and grey threatening rain and high thin clouds that looked like stretched cotton making curving soft streaks.

Basically the day was ride, stop, photo, ride, stop, photo. No speed records.

And climb. Lots of steep climbs (between 8 to 14% grade). We climbed about 4400 feet today. There is a park just outside of Kirksville called Thousand Hills State Park ... Aptly named. Someone claims they counted 146 hills ... Believable.

Our first rest top was in Linneus (population 346) about 35 miles into the ride. Next to where our van was set up was an old house
with "Jail Museum" on a sign out front. Turns out this house was the home of Linn County sheriffs from the late 1800s through the 1970s ... and it had the men and women's jail built into the house.

The sheriff and his family lived in the house. The wife also cooked for the prisoners. The men's cells were built into a large walled off reinforced room in the middle of the house directly behind the house foyer. We talked them into letting us down for a look and there were heavy metal cages built into two walls with bunk beds, graffiti and toilets. We of course staged photos locked in the cells. There was open space outside the cells with a sink, mirror and bench. The rest of the space was filled with junk being stored.

The women were kept upstairs and their rooms had iron bars over the outside of the window. One of the local museum committee ladies was telling me that women prisoners liked to shout down and scare the kids walking by when she was a girl.

The local Museum Committee had successfully gotten their jail added to the national historic building registry and were trying to raise the money to restore it. Currently they are $800 short of restoring the Sheriff's office. I was over hearing them discussing who was going to talk to the mayor about getting information on their fund-raiser in the next months utility bills mailing and how they were going to have to work around the secretary who didn't want to fold extra papers for the mailing. It's funny but I've heard the same conversation with local school districts trying to publicize their local events in WA.

I dropped a donation in the jar, but if this intrigues you consider a donation to the project. Linneus Historical Museum, 101 N. Main Street, Linneus, MO 64653.

When we got into Kirksville Bob and I still had some energy and so we kept riding downtown. Turns out Kirksville is a 2 college town - a med school (osteopathic) and a liberal arts college. The town is a funky mix of old downtown stores and diners that have been there forever and coffee shops and tattoo parlors for the college kids. The courthouse fills the main square and there are 4 historical plaques on each corner - double sided - you have to walk to the back to finish reading them. Most interesting was the "cyclone" i.e. tornado of 1899 that retells stories of women seeing white horses in the same funnel cloud, babies being found cooing 400 yards from its house and a horse still tied up to a post unharmed when the barn around it was picked up and destroyed. Less entertaining but probably more factual is that Kirksville was the site of the Civil War battle that let the Union secure northern Missouri. The town fell in 3 hours to Union troops.

Tomorrow we cross the Mississippi River and leave Missouri. Illinois has a hard act to follow after all the beautiful miles the last few days.