I woke up to a misty morning in the park, and the riding all morning was incredibly nice and quiet. The part of Missouri I had traveled through had been nice and quiet with beautiful farms and beautiful houses. Today I got to see some slightly more shady areas and I actually saw someone flying the confederate flag. Although Missouri was considered a slave state at the start of the American Civil War, there were powerful forces acting for the abolishment of slavery. As the end of the war drew near, a Constitutional Convention for Missouri was held and the question of slavery was settled with the result that Missouri became the first slave state to free its slaves.
After passing through Summersville, I eventually got to Eminence where I sat down for a meal. The area offered a lot of river activities so tourists weren't hard to find.
The riding from here was extremely difficult and it started to get a bit hotter than the previous days. It seemed like whoever laid these roads tried to make a point of not letting the road stay level for one single meter. The brutally steep gradients made me feel like I was climbing vertically, lugging all the weight from the equipment I carried which I really started to doubt if I needed at all. I really wished I had that third smallest ring on my crank now. What made this part so exhausting was that the frequent hills were so steep and the fact that I wasn't able to go low enough on my gears to spin past them. Instead I had to grind over them using my momentum, giving it everything I got on higher gears. However, I tried to capture the steep roads through on camera, but cameras don't do gradients justice!
All the ups and downs of the day made me so exhausted by the time I got to Ellington, and after being chased by another pair of some sort of pitbull-o-saurus', I decided to get a motel room in town. Dinner was on the bed with fruits, chocolate milk and high carbohydrate foods to ready myself for another tough day tomorrow.
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