Day 151. Sept 22. Saturday. Springfield to Carthage, MO

What a glorious day.  57 degrees this morning with light rain.  It stopped by the time we left camp.  I was in heaven.  It was a perfect day and the temps reached 70 degrees for the high.  Wore a light jacket for an hour or two and then shed it for the rest of the day.  Such a difference from last week.  I had energy.  My bike issues had been fixed and I felt like I was flying down the road.  There were several rather steep hills right before this one town and if I had been riding two days ago, I would have had to walk up them.  Today, I climbed in my middle chain ring.  My bike really was sick.  But he is good now.

We had a tail wind most of the way.  Absolute heaven, the opposite of last week.

First item of interest was the ghost town of Plano.  This is all that’s left.

Down the road aways, we came to another ghost town, Spencer.  Really cool.

In between those two ghost towns was another town that was trying to hold on to the old times by making it a tourist attraction.  Hopefully, you can see the 15 cents gas.

We rode out in the country a lot today and I couldn’t resist this mailbox.  So ingenious.

So because we had a rather long stretch with absolutely no services, our tour leaders decided to have a water stop along the way.  Jared was our driver and brought everyone into the stop with his dance routine.  I only got a video so don’t know how this will show up.  He was pretty cool.

If this video runs constantly, I don’t know what my phone battery will do.  Hope it is ok.

Once we got to southern IL, we started seeing lots of possum road kill and as soon as we crossed into MO, the road kill became armadillos.  I didn’t know they were this far north.  But there were and still are a lot of them.  Ugly little creatures.

Also, many, many woolly caterpillars and now crickets.  Also, the walnuts and hedge apples (Osage orange) are falling so there is lots to look out for.

I feel like a new person today with my functioning bike and the low heat factor.  My gosh I was miserable on Thursday.

We are camped in Mi Casa Campground right outside of Carthage.  Nice grass, shade.  Couldn’t ask for more.

71.9 miles today. 4493.5 total