Keokuk to Quincy – 42 Miles
Our day started out with a ffffft (the sound of air escaping a tire).
When I’d plotted out this year’s segment of the MRT, I was quite happy that out of eight days of riding -we were only going to need a shuttle to our hotel on Day 3. All other days were supposed to be us riding hotel-to-hotel. Famous last expectations! Day one started with a shuttle and today ended with one.
We were outside and ready to get going by 9:00 AM when Mike noticed that his back tire was flat. Luckily, he had what he needed to fix it.
Because of his flat tire, I checked my tires and realized that MY back tire was well on its way to being flat too.
That added an hour to our morning! Never in the history of our rides have we both had flat tires at the same time. Mike thinks that both flats were just from wear and tear over time. It had been a while since we’d replaced the tires or tubes.
Of course, Mike spent the entire ride on high alert because if we’d gotten another flat, we did not have any more replacement tubes left. While he was changing the tires, I looked for a bike shop along our route and found one in Quincy (our destination for the day). We decided that we’d ride with our fingers crossed and make a visit to the bike store after we arrived in Quincy. Mike, being Mike, was thinking… IF we arrive!
It was a cold morning, so we layered up and finally got rolling…
Official departure photo.
The first part of our ride started out with us going through the neighborhoods from yesterday, back toward the river and then turning South to continue out of Keokuk. The streets were a pothole obstacle course most of the way, which had me very focused on the road ahead and not fussing with my camera.
We were following the official MRT trail, which is outlined in a 25 year old (at least) guidebook written by an early devotee of the MRT. Each state the MRT passes through plans the route within its own borders. The general goal is to create a route that avoids busy/dangerous highways by using a combination of roads with a safe shoulder or bike lane, less traveled country roads, or bike trails. Unfortunately, that isn’t always possible, so to paraphrase Forest Gump: The route is like a box of chocolates -we don’t always know what we’ll get!
When we got to a neighborhood closest to the river, the GPS directions were like – go one block turn left, go one block turn right, then left, then right… At one right turn we came upon a small park overlooking part of Lock and Dam #19.
The structure in the picture is the Keokuk Power Plant.
Lock #19 at Keokuk is one of the larger locks overall on the Mississippi and has a lift/drop of 38 feet. It is quite interesting to go through it in a kayak! This time we only viewed it from land, but we didn’t manage to get a clear view of the lock, unfortunately.
Just past the park, the GPS said we needed to turn left at the next corner. “Turn left?”, I thought. “But we’re already right next to the river!” At the corner, we didn’t automatically turn. We stopped to scope things out. It looked like a dead end road -ending about 30 feet away. There were about five abandoned-looking cars parked at the end of it. It looked like a road to nowhere. We decided, skeptically, that maybe there was a clue to the way forward that we couldn’t see until we made the turn? So we turned.
Even when we got to the cars, we couldn’t figure out where the MRT was supposed to be! Until we noticed the sign.
The sign pointed us to a really uneven and “forgotten” sidewalk that we had to walk our bikes along for a block or so- with two or three riverfront homes on our right and the river 200 feet below us on the left. It popped out onto a street with an immediate uphill…so we had to walk the bikes up to the top of that hill because we didn’t have enough road before the hill began to build enough momentum to tackle it by bike. Mike called BS on that whole “detour” because in retrospect we could have bypassed that nonsense by not taking that left turn in the first place.
The only thing I can think of is that whoever designed that part of the route must have thought it would be an interesting slice of history for MRT riders? It wasn’t! We were riding through the Park Place-Grand Avenue residential district. The neighborhood is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I had noticed that we were passing some very old houses. I can’t say that they were in great condition, sadly. The “bigwigs” of Keokuk began building their homes along the river there in the mid-1800s. Many of the homes were situated facing the river for the view, while keeping the roads behind the houses. I imagine back then people were able to walk along the river side “front yards” of the homes on walking paths.
After that it was a few blocks further before we rode down a big hill to a traffic light for a street that was actually the highway that our hotel was on (several miles away by then)… Too bad the highway wasn’t a great choice for biking -it would have made our day’s start a lot easier. At the bottom of the hill, we were next to the river so as soon as we turned left, we were riding onto the bike/pedestrian path to cross the bridge there. We were saying goodbye to Iowa and hello to Illinois.
The bridge had a protected pedestrian crossing, which was nice. No much to look at as we crossed though.
Mike took a picture of me on the bridge.
Going over the bridge, my GPS was having a cow. It kept telling me to turn around. I’d actually done all of the GPS routing for this segment in 2022 -so my memory wasn’t fresh on the route details. Seeing that “alert” on the GPS causes a bit of stress! Nicky liked knowing our route -even if she didn’t always go the same way- so I’d taken to showing her our route for the next day on the map the evenings before we rode. That turned out to be extremely helpful for the entire 8 days of riding because in situations like crossing this bridge… I could be very confident that we didn’t need to turn around! (Spoiler Alert… it didn’t always help!)
The road surface for the pedestrian/biker lane coming off of that bridge was horrible. It looked like one of those machines that chews up the road before resurfacing had done its thing -but they forgot to resurface. Fortunately, it wasn’t far before we turned onto a road that had was in better shape -with gentle ups and downs for a while. We came to a town called Warsaw and had a gas station break. Nicky met us there to make sure things were going OK. Just after that we went down a HUGE hill to the river’s edge and began to follow one of the most boring roads I’ve ever had the displeasure of riding on. It got further and further from the river as we rode. It was relatively flat, but we had a headwind that was unrelenting. We pedaled about 20 miles on it. It was somewhat amazing that nearly the entire way was farms and nothing else…mostly cornfields.
We try to stop every 15-20 miles for a quick break. The accommodations weren’t always what we’d hoped for.
We finally returned to the river with about ten miles left to go. We couldn’t always see the river along the MRT route, but vwhen we did it was at least a change of scenery.
As we arrived in Quincy, there was a large riverfront park that we rode through.
We took a moment to decide if we should go straight to the bike store as it was closer to where we were as we arrived in town than the hotel was. We decided it was a good plan to prioritize taking care of the bike tires issue.. We called Nicky and told her to meet us there.
Leaving the park, we had to cross a railroad track. Just our luck a train was passing.
Even luckier, we had to turn right at the street on the other side of the tracks and ended up riding alongside the slow moving train for an earsplitting distance -the train was blowing its horn nearly nonstop due to the roads it was crossing. Loud doesn’t begin to describe it.
The bike shop was in a very decrepit area of Quincy, but thankfully, it was a very nice store..
Four new tubes and four new tires later… Nicky was shuttling us to our hotel. The hotel had been a last minute switch from my 2022 trip plans and it was about five miles off away from the MRT. Since we’d detoured to the bike shop, we were OK with calling it a day and putting the bikes on the car for the ride to the hotel.
Our hotel had a rustic sort of decor -but was nice. I did get a huge kick out of the bell they had on the reception desk. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, but it was about eight inches wide! There was no one in sight when I was checking in and I stood there for a few minutes deciding if I should ring it or not. I felt like a little kid who couldn’t resist hitting the button. It was satisfyingly LOUD! Ha Ha.
You can get an idea of how big it was by noticing the credit card reader right next to it.
