Happy New Year from Missouri

The last couple of days have been spent exploring central and southeastern Missouri as we slowly meander our way to Florida. We are thankful that the winter storms common in the midwest at this time of the year have not made an appearance, giving us the option of leisurely travel.

New Year's Eve in Columbia, Missouri, promised to be a warm day and we had a couple of local options for bike riding. It was still quite chilly in the morning so we walked around a local park and public garden.

The city library was an interesting building and we went inside to have a look. We found a marvelous reading room on the top floor where the sunlight streamed in the windows. That gave us a pleasant hour reading and catching up on the newspapers.

We then decided to drive down to Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri. We wanted to explore the sights there and we figured by that time it would be warm enough to ride our bikes. We were impressed with the capitol building and especially liked the fact that all the streets were deserted due to the holidays.


After looking around the capitol area we got on the Jefferson City Greenway and had a nice 12-mile bike ride, skirting the edge of the city.

Greenway Trail

We finished the day by driving to Rolla, Missouri. No staying up late to ring in the new year for these 2 tired travelers. Fortunately, Rolla was a small enough town that there weren't local revelers to disturb our sleep.

New Year's Day started with an inspiring worship service and message from God's Word at Rolla First Assembly of God church. We got back on the road after church but since it was close to lunch time we didn't drive too far before we spotted an interesting park and decided to make it our stop to eat the lunch we had packed.

Maramec Springs Park has a waterfall at one end of the pond where the water comes from the spring.
I'd never seen a spring this big before. The brochure says "average daily flow of around a hundred million gallons of water, enough to fill about 26 bathtubs every second." There are also several trout rearing ponds managed by the Missouri Department of Conservation. The ponds were filled with rainbow and brown trout, some of them really huge.



The remainder of our New Year's Day was spent enjoying the scenery as we drove southeast through the Missouri Ozarks, ending in the flat Mississippi delta region at Charleston, Missouri.