Sullivan, MO to Mount Pleasant, IA.
We got up and enjoyed coffee and rolls and good conversation with Darlene and Terry on their deck. Then we loaded up and headed off. Morning scripture was Isaiah 50: "... Let him trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God..."
It was already hot and sticky and we suspected it would be another real hot one. The good news is that it didn't get unbearable hot today but the bad news is that it was cooler because of the rain.
We headed east and north on state routes to try and skirt St. Louis. But the traffic was heavy anyhow until we got off the main roads over to the Mississippi river north of the city. We stopped at a small restaurant in Winfield, MO for a huge lunch at a small price. As we rode into town we had noticed some dark clouds in the west. As we ate it got darker outside, the wind came up and it started to pour. We decided there was no reason to rush out into that stuff so slowed our eating pace. Keith had weather radar on his GPS and we could tell it would leave as quickly as it came in. Sure enough, it wasn't long until we could suit up into our rain gear and head off relatively dry.
By the time we pulled into Hannibal it was back to hot and sunny. We had stopped a number of miles back to remove our extra layers of rain gear. We found historic downtown Hannibal, home of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. They have some old buildings to tour plus a Mark Twain Museum. In this museum there was Mark Twain himself giving a talk on his life. He looked pretty good considering he was around 150 years old. He gave a good talk that we enjoyed very much. We decided to head back to the main hwy where we had spied a Dairy Queen. At that location we'd decide how much further we'd head north since the hour was now getting late (4:00 PM).
Our decision was to ride 2 to 3 more hours to get to the Iowa City area. This would make our final days ride not quite so long. We didn't meet our goal...
.
As we were gassing up in Hannibal dark clouds began to roll in. We thought about putting our rain gear on again but decided that perhaps we could out run it since there were clear skies to the north and that was the direction we were going. This plan worked quite well for almost an hour of fast driving. But as we were approaching the Iowa border it became quite evident that our good fortune was about to end. The western sky was becoming very, very dark. Keith's GPS was warning him of thunder storm warnings. We pulled off at the next exit and pulled into a truck shop parking lot. As we were putting our rain gear on the sky turned green, it looked to me that a tornado could drop out of those black clouds at any minute. We retreated into the safety of the truck stop as the wind picked up incredibly hard with driving rain. Our motorcycles were shaking in the wind so that we were worried they might blow over. We put our helmets back on and went back out and drove them over to where there was more protection from the wind. Parked them right up on the sidewalk in front of the side doors under an awning.
As luck would have it, this truck stop had a very nice restaurant so we just decided to eat again and wait out this storm as well. The heavy winds and heavy rains eventually subsided but we could tell that the raining would continue for quite some time. We had been there for about an hour when we decided to head down the road in spite of the wet weather.
We rode about another hour in the rain and made it to Mount Pleasant, IA. After we got unpacked and moved into our room the sun came out and there was a beautiful double rainbow. God's promise to Noah that He'd not flood the world again.
Tomorrow: north to MN and home.
