Planning to Ride the Katy Trail Part 1

In March of this year my husband and I decided we would spend a week of our vacation time riding the Katy Trail.  Are we avid cyclists?  No.  Then why do it?  I guess just to say we did.

I was given the task of planning our ride and our lodging.  We toyed with the idea of camping our way along the trail.  Then we thought about how the weather can sometimes not cooperate with our plans.  Besides it would be nice to have a warm shower every night.  So, hotels and B&Bs it is!  With showers and cozy beds along the way to warm us up and help us recharge our batteries each night we will be living large.

While I was preparing our itinerary my husband was put in charge of making sure we had the needed gear for our ride.  He fitted my 15 year old mountain bike and his purple and yellow Murray 10 speed that he rescued from the trash with new super padded seats, front racks, rear racks, an odometer on his and new hand grips and tires on mine. I was adamant that I wanted rear panniers for my gear.  Being the spoiled princess that I am, my husband bought them for me.  He is content to strap his gym bag onto the rack with bungee cords.  All in all I think we invested about $180 getting our bikes ready for the trip.

We started our training regimen with much enthusiasm.  As the weeks passed we started to slack a bit.  Actually,  we slacked a lot.  We found that a 15-20 mile ride was quite easy for us.  We even did some 40 mile rides with no problems or aches.  The trails in Edwardsville, IL were by far our favorite.  We also did some trails in Creve Coeur, Grant's Trail, the Katy by St. Charles and rides from our house.  Sometimes we would go two or three weeks between rides.  Nevertheless, we have declared ourselves ready to tackle the entire Katy.
 
I bought the Katy Trail Guidebook  to help with my plans.  It is full of information about the towns you pass on the trail and sights you will see along the way.  It gives you the mile markers for everything so we should have no trouble finding what we are looking for.  There is information about places to eat and sleep along the way.  There is even a map and a mileage chart in the back of the book.  All I can say is thank you Brett Dufur for writing this book.  It has made my planning much easier.


I also spent a lot of time on the Katy Trail website.  Their interactive mileage chart is great.  You are able to click on a town and all of the amenities are shown to you.  There are also many reviews of restaurants and lodging.  These were very helpful when I was picking out our accommodations.

After all of my reading and browsing I decided that we should start the trail across the state at Clinton and make our way back towards St. Louis.  We bought train tickets to Warrensburg where our son lives.  He agreed to pick us up at the train station and drive us to Clinton.  There is an extra $10 fee per bike on the train.  Once we reach Machens we will call someone in our family to pick us up. 

Now all I have to do before we leave is figure out where we will be spending our nights along the trail.