Ride 6: Missouri
The Show-Me State—and our home state
State: Missouri (#6)
Area: Kansas City
Route: an ad-hoc course that took us past the sights of our childhood, including around the northland, downtown, the Plaza, and Brookside
Final mileage: 50.07
Date: November 22, 2020
Since beginning this project, the ride we both had perhaps been looking forward to most was the 50-miler in our home state of Missouri. The key question, though, had always been: where would we do it?
Missouri is replete with great places to bike, and given that we spent a lot of our time here as kids traveling all over the state, we could have done this ride anywhere. The Katy Trail, for example, is considered one of the top trails in the country.
But the more we thought about it, the answer became obvious: this one had to be around our hometown of Kansas City, where we first met in kindergarten and where we became the best of buds over the next 12 years before heading off to college.
Because we were already feeling a little sentimental about this ride, we decided to go all in. The route we created would take us past several of our favorite places from our formative years. So we hope our readers, especially those from or still living in KC, enjoy our cataloging of this ride as much as we enjoyed doing it.
The Northland
Alex’s dad was kind enough to set us up with some of his bikes, saving us the trouble of trying to ship our own back to KC or spending money to rent some there. (Side note: Alex was a champ and did this entire ride on a mountain bike!) From his house, we departed on a crisp fall day en route to downtown KC.
Our first major stop was to see our old high school, Winnetonka, which had received a pretty nice facelift since we had graduated 11 years prior.
From there, we began the ride to downtown, biking through Hidden Valley Park over to Chouteau Trafficway, where we turned south and crossed the Missouri River.
Downtown/Midtown
On the other side of the river, we began our trek into downtown. This involved a steep climb up to Cliff Drive and a peaceful cruise through the park that ran alongside it. From there, we headed west to the City Market in downtown, then broke south to hit up one of our favorite places: the Liberty Memorial, where we spent a lot of time in high school (apologies in advance for the poor quality of some of these pictures...)
The Plaza
After our obligatory photo at the memorial, we picked up one of Alex’s med school buddies, Bing, who joined us for a small jaunt through the city’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood. (This part of the ride was so pretty that we forgot to take pics, sorry!)
Unfortunately, Bing had prior obligations and was unable to continue much further, so the two of us ventured onward to the barbecue mecca of Kansas City (MO), where we stopped for lunch.
Stomachs full of burnt ends and fries, we finished the southbound part of our ride by touring the Brookside neighborhood, the final stop before turning around.
Returning home
At this point in the ride, given that it was mid-afternoon in November, the sun was already starting to set and the temp was dropping along with it, so we decided we needed to start wrapping this thing up. We got back to downtown and hopped on the Heart of America Bridge to North Kansas City. From there, we meandered through several neighborhoods as we worked our way to our second childhood educational sight: Antioch Middle School.
Needing just a few more miles to hit 50, we looped north around Hy-Vee—where we made countless grocery trips growing up—and then came back south past our final stop: Chapel Hill Elementary, where we first met in 1997.
And thus concludes what is sure to be one of our most memorable, enjoyable, and cherished rides of this series.
