We just finished riding the Katy Trail across Missouri. For real this time, not virtually.
We went with a tour sponsored by
Road Scholars (cute name, huh?). Thirty-six of us met in St Charles. I was pretty surprised at first, because we were the only ones from Missouri. People came from all over - California, Idaho, Minnesota, Florida, etc. But the one thing most everyone had in common was their age - they were old. Turns out, Road Scholars is the former ElderHostel group which caters to retirees. So they loaded us all up on two shuttle buses with the luggage in one U-Haul and the bikes in another.
We drove to Sedalia on the western end of the trail. Along the way, we stopped at the Canterbury Winery for lunch and then toured the Bothwell Lodge Historic site and the original Katy Depot. Our leader threw in a few educational activities here and there, I guess to go along with the "scholar" aspect of their organization.
We took 5 days to ride the whole trail spending the night in Boonville, Jefferson City, Hermann, and Washington along the way. They constantly fed us. At almost every trailhead, we either had a snack break or a picnic lunch, but I guess we were burning off all those calories on the trail. The first few days, we drank tons of water - it was so hot and humid.
Lots of the trail went right alongside the Missouri River.
We saw lots of quirky little buildings, like this campground at Steamboat Junction. If you wanted a soda, you just left your 75 cents in the jar.
But the most common scenery was corn and soybean fields - lots and lots and lots of cornfields. On one rather long stretch, I thought we were driving across Kansas. It was quite monotonous.
But we finally made it back to St Charles a little butt-sore and sunburned. 188 miles... hard to believe.
