Festus to Perryville – 54 Miles

Today was one of those days that we just put our heads down and pedaled.  Our hotel was off of an exit for I-55, so it had some traffic for us to deal with as we made our way to Hwy 61 that would point us toward Perryville.  After a few miles, we turned onto “61”.  From that point on Hwy 61 was the only road we rode on for the rest of the day.

In this picture you can see what we dealt with trying to get as far over to the shoulder as we could.  The narrow area on the other side of the rumble strips felt like riding on a tightrope -no room to drift or we’d either rattle our brains out on the strips or go off into the dirt.  The “dirt” was soft, so it could have easily caused a fall in the wrong conditions.  We were riding just to the left of the white line, but as close to it as we could.

The route was getting hillier as we went.  Today’s ride had eight hills to climb.  The GPS only mentions hills if they are HILLS.  As I think most people know, we do have pedal assist E-bikes.  They will not go anywhere unless we are pedaling.  What they do is give a bit of a boost in relation to how much effort we’re putting out.  The bikes are a game changer on hills (and headwinds) for me… but it still takes work to get up a big hill.  Because of the number of climbs and the day’s distance, we had to be careful to conserve our batteries so they’d last the whole day.  In the Tour de France, the mountain stages have “categorized climbs”, with a number system for the difficulty.  Each time we arrived at one of the climbs for the day, I got a kick out of announcing to Mike:  This hill is a “categorized climb”.  Of course, these hills were nothing like the mountains that the Tour de France categorizes.

The scenery was a mix of the type of country riding you can see in almost any state.  I took the fewest pictures today of any day on the trip -there just wasn’t much catching my eye.

About halfway to Perryville, we saw a construction sign saying that there was a detour a few miles ahead.  Great…sigh.  When we arrived at the detour corner, we pulled over for a conference to decide what we were going to do.

When I looked at my phone maps, it was obvious that they were routing traffic onto I-55.  We couldn’t go on I-55, of course.  The road beyond the expressway interchange went nowhere.  We weren’t sure exactly how far ahead it was before the road was actually closed, but I wasn’t finding any alternate roads that would work as a Plan B.  The dilemma was… If we went ahead for several miles and if we couldn’t get through, we’d have turn around and go back (how far I didn’t know) -and our mileage for the day was already going to be over 50 miles without any backtracking.

So, I channeled my sister Jane!  She and I rode the first 500 miles of the MRT together a few years before Mike and I decided to make the MRT a project.  Anytime she and I came across a detour on that trip, she was not accepting the detour sign as a done deal.  As I’ve mentioned, detours along the MRT route don’t have directions for bicyclists. People who live in the area of the detour know the roads well enough to figure it out.  If you’re not from the area -good luck!  Our mantra at every detour became:  “We’ll see about that!”

Ultimately, Mike and I realized that we simply had no choice but to “see about that” and keep going.  We had to ride about 11 more miles wondering what we’d find at the construction zone.

On the outskirts of a small village called Bloomsdale, we finally saw the road closed barriers. But we also saw cars going back and forth around them.  We figured that those cars were “local access” -so we became locals!.

A bit further ahead, we arrived at a crossroad in the village.  It turns out that the construction was related to rebuilding the intersection, but Hwy 61 wasn’t really affected at all.  WHEW!

While I was stopped, I took a picture of a restaurant across the street. It looked kind of fun.

It ended up being pretty much a false alarm for bicyclists. The benefit of the long traffic detour was having less traffic to contend with for a while -not that the road was that busy in the first place.

We continued on our way.  St. Genevieve, MO was next on our route.  I was looking forward to riding through the town because it is quite historic.  It was founded in 1735 and they have preserved a lot of the older buildings.  From the map I was using to route the trip, I thought we were going to be riding through the old part of town.  Unfortunately, before I realized it, the GPS had routed us along the more “modern” highway on the outskirts of town and we’d bypassed the historic area completely. That was disappointing.  To be fair, it wasn’t exactly the fault of the GPS.  It only knows what I’ve programmed into it. It is possible that I missed plotting the turn in the first place, or missed the alert for the turn while riding that day.  .

After more miles and more Hwy 61 than we cared for, we were entering Perryville, MO.  Our hotel was near an exchange on I-55, so we had to go a few miles off of Hwy 61 to get there.

After we checked in, Mike and I took our bikes up to put them in the room.  There was a window in the elevator lobby on our floor that overlooked where Nicky had parked the van.  We glanced out and saw her pushing the loaded luggage cart into the hotel.  A “hag’s” work is never done!  (We tell our hags they don’t have to be bell boys -but Nicky was a trooper, helping get everything in and out of our rooms each day).

This was one of those days where there was very little of interest along the way.  If I’d taken more pictures, they would have all looked the same.  The construction area was the only thing that broke the monotony really.

Mama told me there’d be days like this!  (Lyrics courtesy of the Shirelles).  Unfortunately, we’ve been having too many days like this!

Categories: Festus, MO to Perryville, MO, MRT Bike Trip 2018, 2022 & 2026