We slept well in Joey’s Birdhouse B&B, and woke up to the beautiful songs of all the birds outside.

Breakfast was outstanding. It was served in an old mercantile building next door that they use for their kitchen and other things. We left our bike trailer in their barn so we could have a lighter load. So kind of them to let us do that.

The temperatures were just right and gratefully there was no rain. We felt good today. We had good trail food, so that likely helped.

We have to say again how much we love the fact that there are zero cars on this trail! For example, yesterday we were only on a road with cars for 100 yards, and that was just to be able to get to a grocery store. We have been leapfrogging our friend Tony this whole ride, and he has been having quite the adventures. The Missouri River is wide, and it’s cool to ride alongside it so much of the way.

We rode almost 63 miles. Without the trailer, our average speed was about 9.3 mph (about 1.5 mph faster than our other days with the trailer). That felt nice. Near the end of the ride, we could tell we were getting into the suburbs of the city. Most of our ride has been quite rural. We arrived in St. Charles around 5:30. We are staying in a nice hotel, but it required a significant hill climb. And, sadly, it does not have a hot tub. 

In other news, Natalie found a tick on Pete’s ankle! 

We had Subway for dinner. It was just right, and the weather was perfect for a little evening stroll.

At one point in today’s ride, we figured out we had overestimated the distance to the end, giving us a shorter ride tomorrow than expected. We will make it to the very eastern point of the trail tomorrow! And we will only have 26 miles of riding out and back, so it will be an easier day. Then we can rest up in this nice hotel again to begin our ride back to the beginning. Woohoo!

A few random thoughts:

It’s good to work on a hard project like this – a big accomplishment we can do together.

It’s fun to have time to zone out, fun to have time to just talk about whatever pops into our minds.

We love not knowing what time it is.

We love how different it is from our usual daily lives (not that those are bad, just that it’s fun to have variety and adventures).

It doesn’t have to be entirely perfect to be a good adventure and experience. We have lots of random things that don’t seem to work out the best, but we just figure out how to deal with them and move forward.

There are so many things that happen on these trips; we could write for an hour about each day.