We rode the Katy trail for the rest of Missouri, up until the entrance to St. Louis.  We stopped in the two small, cute towns of Columbia and Marthasville.  Missouri was hilly, and very green.  In Columbia, we stayed on a small farm outside of the city.  A man named Mike and his son Gabe took care of the farm, where chickens and one particularly angry rooster scrambled about he yard.  This rooster would not back down like most animals of his size.  When one stepped towards him, he would do the same, and unfortunately, he took that to the next level with Kat.  Kat, who has been around many roosters in her day, figured the rooster would just move away if she walked through the pack to get to the van, however, she was wrong.  The rooster took an aggressive peck at the tendon on the back of Kat’s knee, puncturing a good size hole back there.  Kat is fine now, it did however, take her out of one day of riding!

The next day we were in Marthasville, a small town the Katy trail passed through.  We stayed at a community sports complex.  Our hosts were great, Don and Velva took great care of us. We continued on to St. Louis the next day, a place I have been looking forward to.  We rode in about four days after the huge storm had hit, so there was a good deal of debris on the streets, and many stop lights were out.  Most of the city wad been cleaned up, but there were areas that had not been helped yet, and were covered with fallen branches and trees.  We arrived at the Boys and Girls club to find hundreds of wild children running around.  The head of the club explained to us that many of them had not had power for almost a week, so they were extra antsy.  They were great kids; they instantly latched on to us, and in about two minutes of being there, I had a whole salon styling team on my hair!  We played four square and dodge ball, and worked on theater performances with them.  We definitely enjoyed it.  In St. Louis, we also did some tourist activities, like visit the arch and the Mississippi. 

We crossed the Mississippi river into Illinois on our longest day yet.  We rode over 125 miles into Effingham IL, to stay at a city park, right next to a little league game.  So, we got some snickers bars and snow cones and watched Little league when we got there!  Since we rolled into town at about 5:30, the stay was brief in Effingham, which I didn’t mind.  In the morning we left early and set out to Terre Haute IN.  To greet us into town was the Federal execution site for death row.  Terre Haute was not the most welcoming town; however, we stayed in a beautiful park east of the town, where there were no barbed wire fences.  Elijah had heard some noises coming from his front derailer all day, so when he arrived at the park, he went to check things out to find that his bike frame had snapped.  For those of you who don’t know, I had this same experience last December with the same bike manufacturer, KHS.  The down tube just snapped poor Elijah had to have this happen while we are biking across the country where it is much more difficult to fix.  We spent the next 3 days looking for a new frame to rebuild his bike, but nothing was coming through. Eventually, he bought a new bike for a great deal, and is now riding better than ever.  Unfortunately, it was a frustrating experience to work with KHS due tot heir poor customer service skills and the lack of backing of their product.  Clearly, this was a product malfunction, and they were complete jerks about the way they handled it with him, as well as with me.  (I am sorry, as you can tell, I am very perturbed by KHS and the way they have handled this situation).