Day 23, Explorers in Raccoon Tail Hats

Quite an eventful day. We went 70 miles today, rode on historic Route 66, crossed the Mississippi River, entered Missouri, and rode on the Lewis and Clark Trail.


Route 66 on a Sunday morning was quite deserted but we could imagine how it would've been back in the day, with Cadillacs cruising down the highway topping out at 40 mph. We ourselves did not quite hit 40 mph but with a tailwind (!!) for extended periods of time, we were cruising along ourselves.


We crossed the river in Alton, IL and although we appear to be only 34.7698% done, it feels like we've truly made some good progress as the Mississippi marks the dividing line between the East and the West. Of course, the western portion of this grand country does happen to be a little bit bigger and longer than the eastern portion. We now have formidable states such as Kansas to tackle! More Kansas grumbling to come we are sure, but for now we are going to try and enjoy redneck Missouri as much as we can before the painful, neverending, neverchanging stretch of land known as Kansas.


We had much inspiration from the DC family for how to do these stateline letters, and it was a great idea but we didn't pull out the execution so well. Yes, it does look like Stephanie's pulling her pants down (LOOKS like) and the O is indeed much, much higher than the M. mO?


We finished off our eventful day with a brewhouse tour of our national beer, Budweiser (oops wait, are we all Belgians now?), which was a lot of fun. We saw the Clydesdale horses of course at the stables on the property, and learned that a full-grown Clydesdale stands over 6 feet tall, weighs 2000 lbs, can pull twice its own body weight, and drinks 30 gallons of water per day and eats 50 lbs of hay per day and as much as 10 lbs of grain. Is it odd that we sympathize with the Clydesdales with how much they have to eat in order to pull so much weight?

Fun fact: we saw 4 of the enormous tanks where they ferment the beer (there are 3600 on site). One tank holds 200,000 six-packs of beer. If a person tried to drink all of that beer by drinking one beer per hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take that one person 137 years to drink ONE whole tank of beer. We got started with two free beers courtesy of Anheuser-Busch.

We were relieved to hear that in the Budweiser storage facility in St. Louis, they keep about a half million cases of beer. If production were to stop, that amount of cases would keep the Midwest distributors going for a whole eighteen hours before it would run out. Turns out our own beer consumption is not so far off the mark!