Day 13: Cape Girardeau to Fredricktown, MO 54 miles; total miles 693 Monday, May 2, 2016

Tim and Mark, John's friends from Wisconsin, will arrive tonight to ferry John home Tuesday morning. Ya gotta say enough when you can schedule a ride. Having crossed the US horizontally, John's goal is a vertical crossing. Having completed the norther portion, John will essentially have Illinois left for a later trip.

Tim asked John's wife, Cathy, if they needed to take a bike rack, as they were carrying a lot of fishing gear. Cathy said: John would rather she rode outside the car than his bike.

We had a delicious breakfast with Judith, and then she escorted us out of town. She said she wanted to show us the least hilly route and not just get us out of town. 

After the earlier overnight rains, morning temperatures are pretty cool, perhaps upper 50s F on departure. The day remained overcast and the route grew hillier as we exited the Missouri Bluffs along the Mississippi River and neared the Ozark Mountains. In fact, we had the first light headwinds.

Perhaps we all should live on Meek and Humble Lane — this lane was west of Cape Girardeau.

Critters of the Day: Mother and Child

Lunch. Places like this usually offer home-cooked meals, and this was no exception. I had a delicious breakfast burrito.

Obelisk Attracts. The name turned out to be Swiss, the the real attraction was the extensive obelisk, shown below. In particular, the reference to the reference to George Christopher, who lived 110 years. Imagine the family lore that prompted the investment in this Historical Marker. 

As Paul Harvey used to say, There's more to the story.

Thanks to Nancy Kessler, whose family is from this area:

The 20 family migration from Lincoln County, NC may have included my forebears, who settled in German Township, now Marquand, and Buckhorn near Fredericktown. They were the founding families of one of the first Lutheran churches west of the Mississippi at Cascade. They also crossed the ice at Ste Genevieve (a place you would have liked to see) in the apocryphal stories. 

That marker had some familiar surnames like Limbaugh (yes, as in Rush) and Seabaugh. I'm thinking that "correction" has something to do with the Seabaugh's colorful history.

Lots of Niswonger headstones in the church cemetery, but this was the most unusual.

Clear Cut. Much as in the prior states, clear cutting seemed to be the usual harvest practice. We encountered few logging trucks.

Tim and Mark drove up within 45 minutes of our arrival, having stopped to fish and chill some adult beverages from Wisconsin. Mark went for a walk and researched potential restaurants. He spotted a Cajun-flavored fish restaurant that claimed seven craft beers on tap. With a Boulevard sign in the window, things looked promising until the waitress noted: We need to take down that sign. They had a cloying vanilla stout on tap. A menu specialty was alligator bites, ordered as an appetizer, a bit like white-meat chicken, but firmer, breaded, and deep fried.