Touring - touring through the southern missouri ozarks... suggestions?

Bikeforums.net is a forum about nothing but bikes. Our community can help you find information about hard-to-find and localized information like bicycle tours, specialties like where in your area to have your recumbent bike serviced, or what are the best bicycle tires and seats for the activities you use your bike for.



PDA
bikegrrrl
05-18-10, 12:56 PM
Hey y'all. This summer I'll be taking my first bike tour through the southern missouri ozarks. Woohooo! The plan is to bike out from home in southern illinois, wwoof (farm) for a while in the mountains, then come back home.

I'm hoping that a cyclist familiar with this area can offer some pointers on the route I should take. Cities I'll be going through or passing by will be cape girardeau, poplar bluff, and west plains. I've been playing with the google bicycling directions, but they seem pretty sketchy. So, any suggestions?

mrhedges
05-18-10, 02:10 PM
about a year ago, roughly, I thought about doing a similar tour and posted a question, got some good responses, though nothing clear. Not a super common area to tour i guess, but very very pretty from what i hear, actually planning a camping trip there this summer. But in a car...
nancy sv
05-18-10, 02:16 PM
I don't have any specific route suggestions - we just picked some roads on the map and went for it. But - the best suggestion I can give is low gears. Very, very low gears. Those hills are killers!

bikegrrrl
05-20-10, 02:07 PM
no kidding, from everything I've read, this will be a tough challenge! I'm planning on taking it pretty slow to try and offset the hills...
k9power
05-20-10, 03:16 PM
I can tell you driving around the Ozark mountains on the Arkansas side is beautiful so perhaps it is equally as nice there.