Just as important as protecting your skin from the
sun is regularly examining your skin for any distinct changes, i.e.
a change in a mole, a new mole or a lesion.  You should do this regularly,
know your skin and bring any changes to the attention of a dermatologist. 
 
The Melanoma International Foundation funds
patient assistance programs, providing reassurance and understanding
on the journey of having the disease as well as providing free screening
and awareness events. They provide education through their professionally
moderated forum and helpline. 
Melanoma can be fatal, especially if not caught early. But there’s also
a lot of low-hanging fruit in melanoma prevention –  broad-brimmed
hats, protective clothing, staying indoors or in the shade
during the most intense midday hours. 

I am using this bike ride to request pledges and donations to support the excellent and important work of the Melanoma International Foundation. In particular, your pledges here will support the Leroy Coolbreeze Fund at the Melanoma International Foundation.

The Leroy Coolbreeze Fund honors the memory of Ian Copeland, a legendary music agent and bon vivant who brought great joy to many people throughout his too-short life. Along with his brothers Stewart (best known as the drummer in The Police) and Miles (who, among other things, managed The Police and founded IRS Records), Ian brought music into being that changed my life and thrilled me starting in the late 1970s. Their work continues to thrill and excite me to this day. Ian died from melanoma in 2006. My request for your support is a testimony to the value the Copeland family has brought to my life, and the joy I experience daily through listening to and playing the music that they have created.

As my friends and I ride along the Lewis & Clark Trail, please give to this worthy cause. If you can specify the “Leroy Coolbreeze Fund” and “Lynne” in your donation, then the great MIF folks will take it from there, and will know that our Lewis & Clark Trail bike tour is raising your awareness of the importance of melanoma outreach and research, and enabling them to do even more of this important work.

[NOTE: I've front-dated this post so that it stays on top throughout our entire journey. This is too important to get buried.]

I have to play around with my handlebar position to address my hand numbness and trapezius soreness.

Sunscreen and bug spray and breathable second-skin bandages are important things to have every day on the tour.

Seeing the country by bike allows you to see and appreciate things that are impossible to see and appreciate by car, and that applies both to flora/fauna/geology and to human action and human history.

This country is vast. Vast.

The courage, intrepidness, and iron will of the people who explored and settled the American frontier are mind-boggling.

Some of the things I ate with relative abandon that I don’t usually eat were

• Steak: typically either prime rib or filet, so still low-fat cuts
• Barbecue: because going to Kansas City and not eating barbecue is just wrong
• Beer: maltase can crank up my blood sugar, so I usually don’t drink beer any more, but this tour was an exception
• Ice cream
• Swedish fish: red ones
• Licorice: black ones
• Bread products: bread, hamburger buns
• Fried potatoes, although some of them were sweet potato french fries, so at least a wee bit more healthy …
• Pancakes
• Bacon

I even had a full-sugar can of Dr. Pepper one day, and I was burning so many calories that I didn’t get a sugar buzz at all. Now it’s back to the beans, cereal, soymilk, fresh veggies, chicken that took a back seat during the tour …

It turned out to be a great coincidence that we ended our ride in St. Charles on the 4th of July. Not only does Independence Day commemorate the same spirit that inspired me in the Lewis & Clark expedition, but St. Charles also does its 4th of July celebration up right. It’s a large small town, with a historic downtown and a gorgeous riverfront. When we walked down to Riverfest, we happened to be approaching just as a traditional band was playing the fitting Liberty Bell March by John Philip Sousa, which is perhaps best known as the theme song for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. As four Monty Python fans, we all appreciated the simultaneous celebration of individual liberty and fine British comedy!

The St. Charles train depot is charming and quaint, and beautifully maintained:

We sat near it to watch the fireworks that night, which were seriously probably the best fireworks I’ve ever seen!

Along this stretch the Katy Trail winds through areas settled by German immigrants, including Rhineland, where we saw this lovely church:

The bluffs and hills along the Missouri River here are also the center of Missouri’s wine country (including towns like Hermann), where the descendants of German immigrants make German-style wines, including those from white grapes like vidal blanc and seyval blanc.

Here’s some of Team Corps of Discovery in action on this gorgeous day:

We stopped for the typical lunch of cycling champions (peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, mixed nuts and dried fruit, and apples and oranges) in Treloar, where another cyclist kindly took a picture of the entire Team Corps of Discovery:

I only rode 32 miles on the last day, because of my sore wrists and trapezius. But the reason I stopped there was so I could remember enjoying the 32 miles I did ride, instead of grumbling through the whole ride.

That meant that I was driving the sag wagon into St. Charles. Not only was the trailhead in St. Charles right near the park where the 4th of July festivities were taking place … our hotel was literally feet from the trailhead! So I got us all checked in, showered, made a dinner reservation at the brewpub at the trailhead, and reflected on a very fun tour!

The first part of the ride this day was rolling country roads, and in Boonville:

we picked up the Katy Trail. The Katy Trail is the longest rails-to-trails trail in the U.S., along the line of the former MKT (Missouri-Kansas-Texas) Railroad rail line, which stopped service in 1986. Over half of the MKT line runs along the Missouri River at the base of the bluffs, so the ride is a flat crushed limestone path with trees, bluffs, swamp, and floodplain. There are also several neat steel truss bridges, such as this one further east on the Trail:

We lunched in Rocheport, at a bike shop/cafe along the trail:

We saw lots of flora and charismatic megafauna: horsetail (scouring rush), which has a high silica content and is still used to polish reeds for woodwind instruments; box turtles, terrapins, lots of dragonflies, tiny jumping toads, a bull snake, deer, indigo buntings, bluebirds, …

I rode 61 miles, and they were enjoyable because the road and trail were both beautiful and scenic. However … my road bike is not the best bike for riding the Katy Trail, so by the time we got to Tebbetts, my wrists and my shoulders/trapezius muscles were very sore. I was feeling every vibration in the surface.

That night we stayed in the Turner-Katy Trail Shelter in Tebbetts, a bunkhouse for cyclists right on the trail. It had the most important feature of any overnight stop for a cyclist: a hot shower with great water pressure!

We drive back up I-35 to get back on our map’s route, and we sit. And wait. And get some coffee at the convenience store. And wander through the fireworks tent next door (I was always drawn to the ones that promise giant flaming balls!). And wait. There was just enough lightning to make us leery, but not enough rain to drive us into the car to wait it out.

So we decide to drive on to Lawson, Missouri, hoping that as we moved east and the storm moved northeast our trajectories would diverge. Sadly, it was not to be. We hung out in the town park, in a pavilion, and then as we thought the storm passed we headed into a local cafe for a morale-boosting mid-morning snack. Sadly, we left the cafe in as much rain as we entered it …

We drove a bit further along the route, and the weather cleared up sufficiently that we thought it was worth trying for a bit of a ride. I’m pretty risk averse about lightning, so I offered to drive. The guys got in 5 miles of riding, but the lightning line ahead of us was still too close and too threatening to make riding safe.

So we packed it in and headed to get some lunch in Lexington, which has a lot of importance in American history. Situated on the Missouri River bluffs, it lies on the Lewis & Clark Trail. It’s also the site of a 3-day battle in the Civil War, and was the location of Russell, Majors & Waddell. RMW were the main outfitters for people heading west on the Santa Fe Trail, and they later founded the Pony Express. We didn’t go check any of them out, but there are several points along the Santa Fe Trail through Missouri where you can still see the wagon ruts from the trains of Conestoga wagons heading west. Here’s a snap of me with Matt and Al in front of the Lexington Pony Express memorial plaque:

After lunch we headed out in hopes of finding clear weather for afternoon riding. No such luck. More rain, and enough thunder to make us all uncomfortable at the thought of riding. Truly exasperating, to be raring to go but to have this yes-no-maybe back-and-forth with the weather.

So we head to our terminus for the day, Marshall, Missouri. We ran into some bad mojo at the Super 8 Motel where we had a reservation; the owner would not let us bring our bikes into our rooms. This is the first bad mojo we’ve encountered in the entire tour; everyone else has been welcoming and curious about our trip. So we left, walked our bikes across the street in a driving rain to the Comfort Inn, where they welcomed our business enthusiastically (and gave us cleaning towels to dry off our bikes).

After a utilitarian but uninspiring dinner at Applebee’s, we topped off our frustrating day with a wee dram of Highland Park and a good night’s sleep, to ready ourselves for Thursday’s ride.

We slept in, cleaned the bikes, did some maintenance, re-taped my handlebars (my tape job got trashed in my little gravel incident), and chilled out.

Kansas City has a lot of interesting industrial and rail history and architecture, so after our Tuesday night dinner at Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue (an assortment of beef ribs, pork ribs, lamb ribs, beef brisket, and “burnt ends”, yum!), we strolled through Union Station and pondered Kansas City’s role as a rail transportation and agricultural hub. There are lots of neat old brick warehouses, many of which have been transformed into loft condominiums. The area near the restaurant and Union Station also has some funky art galleries, so we had fun peering into their windows.

Then it was off to an early sleep, to get ready for Wednesday’s ride: Holt, Missouri to Marshall, Missouri.

The vegetation was also shifting from the scrubby high plains plants of South Dakota and Nebraska into more lush Eastern-style forest vegetation.

We had a great lunch in Platte City, Missouri, at a tea shop/cafe, and ended our day by driving from Holt to Kansas City for our day off. We ate steak that night at Plaza III, one of Kansas City’s famous swanky steakhouses.

I rode 42 miles that day, and they were 42 good ones!

Wipeout!

It hurt. Yowie, did it hurt. But I didn’t break or sprain anything, either on myself or on my bike. I have some spectacular scratches and bruises, as you can infer from my right leg and left index finger here:

I lost a day of riding on Sunday, but I’m fine. It’s really too bad, because the weather was glorious and the route between Nebraska City, Nebraska and White Cloud, Kansas was spectacular. Rolling hills, huge fields of corn swaying gently in the wind, bright blue sky. The guys had a great day of riding; Al in particular was ecstatic.

Interestingly, when we got to White Cloud, where we were planning to camp, we found the marina “campground” a foot deep in mud from flooding three weeks ago:

So we drove on to Atchison, Kansas, and got a hotel. I love Atchison! More on Atchison in a separate post, but it has a great rail history and we puttered around next to the old Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad depot for some time:

Among other things, this trip is an exercise in adaptation, and again I feel like I’m channeling Lewis & Clark: you don’t undertake as enormous an enterprise as theirs without realizing that you will have to adapt to dynamic and changing conditions. Today threw a lot of things at me that required adaptation (nothing on the scale of the Corps of Discovery, but still, the simile strikes me as apt).

Extra points if you can identify the quote in my title: it’s from Episode 34 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Harold Pither’s cycling tour of Cornwall (“September 2nd. Did not fall off outside Iddesley.”).