June 9,2018 Carthage, MO to Strafford, MO

74.55 miles. Another early start (for me), around 7:30 a.m.  I grabbed some breakfast, and rode back to RT 66 through town, even though GPS told me that there was a shorter way. ( Yea right.....on some cow path). 66 started out wonderfully, as the first 20 miles I rode was on brand spanking new asphalt. Nice shoulder, not even line painted yet. I rode past a festival of some sort that they were just starting to set up in the town square, near the Courthouse in Carthage, and past a kids fishing tournament at a lake just outside of town. The roads rolled very gently because I climbed over 2000 ft for the day, but smooth surface and a tailwind make the hills seem smaller. I only switched down to the granny gear on the front sprocket twice. The scenery was non descript hay fields, either cut and bailed or not, corn and soybean, cattle, lots of farm houses and ranches, made of the roundish stone that must be plentiful here. There were lots of signs and billboards reminding you to fear God and fear hell. Small towns and ghost towns were the only things I saw. There was exactly one convenience store/gas station from Carthage until I hit the outskirts of Springfield, 60 miles later. Traffic picked up as the day went on, and the road gradually deteriorated as far as bicycling after those first 20 miles of fresh asphalt. The road was fine, but the shoulders got narrowed down to about two feet, and then, the rumble strips in the middle of the shoulder began. I rode out in the road and just did my best as traffic was at it's worst when I had the rumble strips. That seems to be a Missouri thing. Adventure Cycling has been working with States on that very problem, but Missouri hasn't done much. With the old 66 route coming through their state now, at least they hadn't put them in where the new asphalt was.......yet.
Springfield is a town of 160,000 people, and was very easily navigated just by following the blue,  Rt 66 biway signs. Downtown was nice, with a neat square in the middle of town, Missouri State University, and I saw the crowd arriving at the convention center for an indoor football game against the Tulsa Roughnecks. Drury University is here as well as Evangel University. I sorta get the feeling I'm in Bible thumping country. Ten miles east of Springfield, I ran parallel with I 44, past all the trucking companies that weren't working because it was the weekend, I came to the town of Strafford, where Pam was wedged into a very narrow site at the Strafford Rv Park.
Overall, the cloud cover was pretty good today, but there was a big, badass, cloud just ahead of me when I pulled into the Rv Park, but even though Pam had gotten damp a little earlier, I felt exactly two drops. I may complete this entire, shortened trip, without getting wet. Traffic was really light through town, probably because it was a Saturday, but 66 had more truck traffic than I expected on both sides of Springfield.