Farmington, MO not Effington, IL

Penny and Margaret's House + Snow!

Snow is still on the ground here in St. Louis, but alas we can't piddle our precious time away in St. Louis. As beautiful as St. Louis is, we must move on. It's a nippy 26 degrees with the windchill this morning, but we'll manage.

Our first stop for the day is Farmington, MO. Kind of makes me think of the song Effington from the new Ben Folds CD, which you should all check out! Anyway, we should get riding. We have to find Danny some thermal underwear so we can face the cold.

Not sure where we are sleeping tonight. Depends on how far we can get. It's about 70 miles to Farmington, so we'll see how it goes. I'm guessing our next blog update will be in about a week or so.

Scout and I love blogging together

Snow?!?!

To whoever is out there,

Jesse and I have made it to St. Louis where it is pouring rain and promising to snow a little bit later... SNOW! Ahh!

Illinois meets Missouri

We're lucky enough to be in a nice warm house thanks to my friend Rob's aunt Penny. We got here at 9:00 last night to two enormous pizzas, hot showers, and warm beds which was quite amazing (Though the inflatable mattress Jesse was on deflated part way through the night.) THANK YOU PENNY AND MARGARET! I suppose we're going to take a day, or part of one anyway, to plan out a route that involves logic, stop at a bike shop, and perhaps wait for our asses to reform their normal shapes.

Jesse watches over the stew

I'll now list a couple of small observations I've made for no apparent reason:

Danny's falls: 3
Jesse's falls: 2
Number of road kill passed so far: 11
Number of banana peels passed on the side of the road: 7
Times those peels have reminded me of Mario Kart: 7
Number of times we've been yelled at: 4
Times we've been given the finger: 1
Number of people who have menacingly brandished their car keys in our direction: 1
Important things we forgot: Sunblock, Pain killers.

That's all for now -- time to do something that seems constructive.

-Danny

Leaving in a week - Time Crunch

So Myself (Jesse), Danny, Greg, and Tamara were all sitting around the table in Tamara's Kitchen and Jim and his biking buddy, Ken, were talking about a cross-country bike trip they took in the early 80's. This sparked my interest quite a bit and I ended up calling Danny to run this crazy bike trip idea by him. Surprisingly enough he was very interested.

So yeah, I guess the rest is history. Seeing as we both have minimal biking experience it took us a long time to research what bikes and biking equipment we'd need because neither of us have taken a trip like this before.

We ended up investing in a pair of Surly Long Haul Truckers. The amount of research we had to do for this trip in such a short period was mind boggling. I wouldn't say wer're confident, but hopefully our drive is enough to carry us to the coast.

We decided to piece together the route as we go, but we'd like to head south and hit the coast in San Diego. We're going to start in Springfield, Illinois to avoid freezing nights in WI. I'm going to try and do a blog entry at least once per state.



-Jesse