Friday 9^h April , Ramada Inn, Springfield Missouri.

A very strange and interesting couple of days

Yesterday

Up at six as usual. They had oat-meal so I had three bowls to make up for lost time. It is definitely my lucky charm.

We set off at 7.30 and headed back into town for the Chester Bridge across the Mississippi. On the way we stopped for photos with a statue of Olive Oil but missed out on Popeye as we were in fast-moving traffic when we spotted him. Having seen the Olive Oil photos I can live with this.

There were road works on the bridge and it was pretty chaotic but we stopped for a few last photos of the wonderful river and the bridge, itself very impressive.

The river is the State line and once across we were into Missouri, state number four. We only just clipped the southern edge of Illinois and were there too briefly to really form an impression of the state. Not as friendly as Kentucky. Lots of German street names and some definitely Irish faces, particularly around Murphysboro, which may account for the sudden prevalence of Lutheran and Catholic churches,

Once across the river, we just flew the first seven mile; 20 mph with hardly an effort. Then we turned left and we were heading straight into the wind for the next five and I could feel my sprits sinking again. W cycled on another ten miles to Ozora , the only possible stopping point for food or drink all day according to the guide book, but there was nothing there. Not a shop, diner or garage. And we were now in the Ozarks with the hills getting ominously steeper and more frequent. Sod it, sod it, sod it.

Then suddenly, quite absurdly, things suddenly got better. And better. All day.

Firstly, in the middle of a nondescript road in Crown Ridge, we came across, a place called Tiger Ridge. A wild life park and, more importantly, a restaurant. They served lunch from 11. It was 11.02. Bingo! They had five tigers and one lion but the bison that was in my burger is apparently brought in from elsewhere. Like beef but a bit more gamey. Very tasty.

We had been getting increasingly concerned about our prospects of accommodation over the coming days in the Ozarks. The only thing available in a couple of places seemed to be camp-sites and we’re both a bit old for all that gin gan gooly nonsense. Over lunch. Mike suggested a cunning plan. Once we reached Farmington, our destination for the day, why not find a bar or diner and see if we could someone we could pay to take us, and our bikes, in a pick- up truck to Pittsburg on the Kansas border.

I was, obviously, extremely reluctant to go along with this as it would go against the Corinthian spirit of our enterprise, but then again, I figured, once you’ve seen one Ozark you’ve probably seen them all.

Our waitress recommended the Tradition Inn in Farmington as a good place to stay, adding that it had Spokes bar and Grill next door which sounded a promising place for Mike’s plan.

So I felt distinctly perkier as we set off after lunch. And then, as if by magic, the road flattened out and the wind dropped. We made pretty good time to Farmington where we found the Tradition Inn fairly easily. Once checked in, I logged on to the internet to find that Fulham had reached the semi final of the Europa Cup. You have to have suffered the agony of forty years of following Fulham up and (usually) down the various divisions to know what that feels like.

In no time at all we found ourselves sitting at the bar in Spokes, talking to a couple of beer- swilling locals, one of whom recognised us and confessed that he had nearly run us down on Main Street. (He actually phoned a friend to tell him; “Hey Bill, guess who I’m having a drink with? Remember those guys I nearly ran down?”) They were good blokes and we hit it off quickly. Neither had been in England but one said that he had always wanted to visit Normandy to visit the D Day beaches; “Normandy, that in England or France?”

I put our idea to them and they said that it would be much easier and cheaper just to hire an SUV ourselves. They gave us the name of a local garage that did car hire and drew us a map of how to get there. It seemed like a great idea to me - but then I wouldn’t be doing the driving.

After a decent dinner of fajitas and a bottle of something that had “Bordeaux Style” on the label and smelt of petrol, I rolled off to bed much cheerier than for a long time.

Today.

To cut a (very) long story short, it all worked . Thanks to an amazingly helpful guy called Tim at Enterprise Cars, in Farmington we have arrived in Springfield, the capital of Missouri. (We couldn’t go to Pittsburg as there was nowhere there to drop off the hire car) It means cutting out three days of hill climbing saving ourselves a couple of hundred miles and, most importantly, ensuring a roof over our heads for the next few days.

We had to drive 83 miles north to St. Louis to pick up our “final” car (no big deal for Americans but imagine being told in Wandsworth you had to go to Oxford to pick up a hire car). In total we had to transfer our bikes between three cars, and an airport shuttle bus. Mike heroically drove the 200+ miles while I, with childish glee, looked out the window at the passing hills. At one point, very briefly we were actually on Route 66.

Cheating? I prefer to think of it as sound logistical management. And we promise not to do it again. (The cost of the hire car will be more than off-set by saving on accommodation. I suggested to Mike that we extrapolate the overall saving possible, if we adopted this approach for the whole trip. He kicked me in the shin.)