Day 20 : A Rough Day With a Beautiful Ending...

From Johnson Shut-ins State Park to Eminence, MO - ~55 miles

our start to the day was delayed again today because of the threat of rain. it seemed to be threatening a serious storm just before we got up, however it seemed to blow over. so before too long, we got things loaded up and got out on the road.

we had a great 10 mile ride into a little town called centerville where we found a great ma and pa joint where we were able to get some breakfast. we went in, sat down, and ordered some food...and before too long the one other guy in the place started to join in on our conversation from his table a short distance away. so we invited him to come over and sit with us. his name was dave, he lives in st. louis but has a little cabin for the weekends in centerville. he was full of great stories about all kinds of different things. it was a great way to start a morning.

we headed out from centervill and had another great 15 miles of riding to get us to a place called ellington. we got some food and drinks in ellington because it was going to be 27 miles without services to get us into eminence. as we left ellington, the riding got significantly tougher...the hills started coming, the temperature went up, and about 10 miles outside of eminence, we began to run out of water. it seemed as though we were literally limping into eminence. i was to the point where i was hoping that at the bottom of every hill we would find eminence. unfortunately, there were a lot of hills that did not have eminence at the bottom of them.

by the time we got to eminence, justin and i were both feeling pretty dehydrated...almost to the point of being delirious. we cycled up to another home down diner type of a place, and headed inside. the waitress must have thought we looked like we were about to die...she came over and asked if we wanted something to drink and so we promptly each ordered a water a mountain dew. it took us a good 10 minutes of just sitting there and drinking before we were even able to order food. once we finally ordered some food, a guy walked in from the bed and breakfast across the street. turns out he was another cyclist on the transamerica...but he had come down with shingles and was going to have to call it quits for his tour in eminence. he was an older guy, and i was just super impressed that he had made it that far. it was sad to see him have to shut it down...but in some senses, i think he was pretty excited to see his wife.

we ate our food and enjoyed it greatly. after we got ourselves feeling better, we headed down the street to the local grocery store to grab ourselves some hot dogs, buns and baked beans to cook over the fire for dinner. from there, we headed down the road about 1/2 a mile to the jack's fork campground that sat right on the jack's fork river. we asked the lady at the office if she could get us a site right down close to the river, and sure enough, they got us a site about 40 yards from the river. we got our tents set up and quickly got our swimming suits on and headed to the river to swim for a good solid hour in some very cold but very refreshing water.

we finished the night by making a fire and cooking hot dogs and beans over an open fire. between the great river swim and the cooking over the open fire, it was a great ending to a quite difficult day.