Day 7 – Watkins Mill SP to Weston Bend SP – Raided

43.4 hot miles today – 388.3 total miles

Last night when going to bed, I put our food up where I thought the critters couldn’t get to it.  We were wrong.  In the morning, the food bag was gone.  We found it in the woods a few feet, empty.  We did find our peanut butter and a broken into box of macaroni.  By the teeth marks on the peanut butter jar, they obviously really wanted to get into it, but without success.  We still had some oatmeal in a pannier, that I didn’t put up, so we had food for breakfast.

We got out of the camp site at abou 9:30-10 this morning.  It was a nice park and nice to see Bill again.  We decided to vary from the AC route again and see if we could cut some miles off the trip.  Since we were on the South side of the park we dropped down to Higway 92 (or 92 Highway as they call it around these parts).  We figured if we were going to have rollers, we might as well have fewer of them.

We got fewer of them but the road was busier than we liked.  It seemed that the closer we got to the Kansas City area, the ruder the drivers were.  It’s amazing how many people can get mad for being inconvenienced for 30 seconds.

In Smithville we stopped for pizza at Pizza Hut, then went by the library to upload blog reports.  Their internet was down for about 30 minutes so we went on to the bike shop to look for a fender bolt that fell off Keith’s bike.  The person there was just filling in for the day and wasn’t a mechanic.  She couldn’t find the bolt.  We asked her about the road ahead, and she told us that it would get busier at about 4:30 or 5:00.  We decided not to go back to the library but to go on down the road so we could get off this busier highway.

A few miles out of town we were climbing a hill when my chain came off.  I had almost no momentum and went down hard.  Got a cut on my heal, but otherwise I was OK, picked up the bike and kept going.  I was thankful that there was no traffic at the time.

It was a hot day.. We had stop a number of times just to cool down.  We have been drinking a lot of water to keep up, and stopping for Gatorade very often.

In Platte City we stopped at the Dairy Queen to cool down and gather information.  We found that the library was just down the road in town and we headed that way.  It was a great down hill stretch into town that was a lot of fun.  The library was just about to close but we had enough time to get the daily blogs uploaded. When I opened the computer I discovered that my fall  earlier had cracked the display.  So far it’s still useable, but there are black spots I have to work around.  I hope that it will last the whole trip.

After we left the Library we started down the hill again to the river.  I pull into a gas station. We still needed groceries for Sabbath, but it looked like we were headed out of town. We asked a gentleman on a motorcycle and he told us what were afraid of.  The only grocery store was at the top of the big hill we just came down.  So up the hill we climbed, got our groceries and headed for Weston Bend State Park about 6 miles down the road.

The park itself has some of the steepest hills we have climbed.  We both ended up pushing up the last part of one of them.  We checked in with the campground host and he told us what sites were empty.  We found one of the sites and started to unload.  He then came by and told us the site was occupied and explained to us how stupid we were for not knowing that.  He may be a campground host, but hospitality is not one of his gifts.

We reloaded the bikes and found another campsite, setup camp, had supper, and showered.