Palm Beach Bike Tours

Ken Steinhoff spent more than 40 years in the ink-slinging newspaper business where he had a license to be nosy. Palm Beach Bike Tours renewed that license in his retirement years. The blog is ostensibly about cycling, photography and using GPS technology to figure out where you're going and where you've been. It's really an extension of his lifelong effort to tell the stories of "ordinary people doing ordinary things", which sometimes turns out to be pretty extraordinary. If all that sounds like something in which you might be interested, please sign up for the PBBT RSS feed to keep in touch.

Nikon D700 Review Summary: Just Buy One. Now.

Using the Nikon D700 DSLR for the first time was a life-changing experience on par with the birth of my son. If you love photography, gave up photography when the world went digital and miss shooting with your beloved Nikon 35mm SLR camera, buy the Nikon D700 today and find happiness.

This is not a technical review but more of a commentary on what this Nikon D700 camera means to me. No brick walls were photographed in the creation of this article. If you absolutely must ogle the Nikon D700’s technical specs please read what Thom Hogan and Ken Rockwell have to say.

(I promise there is a D700 analysis here somewhere. If don’t care about how I got to the D700, skip down to the end where I tell you it is wonderful or, better yet, just buy one and find out for yourself.)

Film is Dead. Long Live Digital

I don’t know exactly when film died but I have a guess. When I went through the family Nikon stockpile, I found this 1994 Fuji film box end on the back of a Nikon FE2. So, 1994, or pretty close to then.

I can still remember shooting film after 1994 but it stopped being fun. Digital was coming. It was clunky and nowhere near the quality of film but, by 1998, the only place I wanted to show my pictures was online. Shooting film, processing, printing and then scanning was too much work.

Enter the Nikon Coolpix 950. Image quality was low. Shutter lag was measured in seconds. It could only take two frames a minute. Color reproduction was poor. In every respect, it was worse than a 1967-era Nikon F. Except, it was digital. I started shooting pictures again. It wasn’t a lot of fun but at least it was immediate.

As soon as I touched the Coolpix 950, I knew I’d never shoot another roll of film.

Cameras I have Known and Loved

My father, Ken of PBBT Fame, was a photojournalist and has been shooting for 50 years. I picked up photography from him. I have used a lot of camera hardware over the years.

While having used a lot of equipment doesn’t make me a great photographer, it does give me an idea as to what I like and dislike in camera equipment.

My first real camera was a Nikon FG-20. I used it for several years but never loved its feel — it felt small and the plastic film advance lever wasn’t nearly as solid as the metal advance on the Nikon F2. The Nikon N8008 was an amazing, functional camera with lots of technological bells and whistles but felt plastic. I took some of my best photos with the ‘8008 but it didn’t have the classic camera feel of my next camera: the Nikon FM2.

The FM2 was a real camera. It was metal. With the MD-12 motor drive, it had the heft and balance of a fine piece of photographic equipment. Unlike the older F2, it had an accurate meter and was modern enough to not to be temperamental. For being a step backwards technologically, the FM2 was satisfying for both the images it captured and the style in which it took them.

A Word About Nikon Lenses

Metal: good. Plastic: bad.

Yes, just about any plastic Nikon lens you buy today will out-perform any 1970s- or 1980s-era Nikon lens. The production quality and science of lens design and construction today is wonderful. Still, today’s lenses feel cheap. A big, heavy 180mm f/2.8 lens from 1972 (did they even have ED glass then?), with its smooth-as-glass focus ring warms one’s heart. The current generation wonder lens, the Nikon 18-200mm AF-S G-Wiz VR Nikkor Nanotaco Lens, will outperform those Nikon classic fixed-length lenses even though it is a 10x-zoom lens and half their weight.

Nostalgia aside, today’s zoom lenses are optically awesome. Today’s Nikon Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Nikkor lens allowed me to stop carrying a 105/2.5, 135/2.8 and 180/2.8. (I never had an 85mm or it would be gone, too.) One lens replaced three. At each focal length, side by side, the zoom produces better quality pictures. Factor in the ability to have those lengths as well as everything between 70mm and 200mm and you have a clear win for the zoom.

At the short end, too, zooms rock. My Nikon Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S Zoom Nikkor replaced a 24/2.8 and 35/2. If I had been fortunate enough to have a 20/2.8, it would have been gone, too.

With just two lenses in my bag, the 17-35/2.8 and 70-200/2.8, I can shoot just about anything I come across. Toss in a 60/2.8 macro and a 300/2.8 (with a 1.4x teleconverter?) and the entire photographic world is my oyster.

(As a side note, even the AI-converted Nikon 24 f/2.8 lens my father bought used in 1968 works just fine on the D700. Does that blow your mind or what? Manual-focus Nikon lenses made a decade before I was born will matrix meter on the D700. You can’t even come close to saying that about Canon and their digital cameras.)

Nikon D70 and the Age of Fun Digital

The Nikon D70 and my son were both born in 2004.

The D70 was announced in January 2004. Malcolm was due to arrive the end of August.

At long last, there was a good reason for me to upgrade from the Coolpix. The D70 was everything I wanted in a digital camera except that it was a DX-cropped camera instead of a full 35mm frame. (Basically, what that mean is that the 24mm lens and its correct angle of view effectively became a 36mm lens. Every lens I had was suddenly 1.5x longer. This is an oversimplification. Go read some technical blog if you care to know more.)

Still, I had a kid on the way and the D70 was the first digital camera that was mostly okay for under $1,000. Thanks to lowered expectations, a hard deadline and the price point, I made the jump to a digital SLR.

D70 — DX Crop Means Never Wide Enough

If you never used a 35mm film camera with a lens wider than 35mm, you don’t care that your new digital camera is cropped by a 1.5 multiple. The 18mm-70mm or whatever zoom lens that came with the camera is plenty good at its effective 27mm view. Best of all, at the long end your 200mm lens is now a 300mm lens. All the better to shoot pictures of your kid’s soccer game.

I, on the other hand, wanted to be able to see 24mm of view. In fact, my 17-35mm zoom lens at 17mm is nirvana.

The D70 was functionally awesome. The color was spot-on most of the time. Image quality was good. Its crisp response was worlds better than the Coolpix. Photography was fun again and the quality was once again near film (except in low light). But, just like the FG-20 and N8008, the D70 didn’t have the right feel. I always knew I was shooting digital. I always knew the camera was plastic. I knew the D70 wasn’t a classic.

D700 Review and Commentary

The Nikon D700 is everything I have ever wanted in a camera.

Not only does the D700 meet all my technical requirements for a camera, it meets all my tactile and emotional requirements. It feels like a classic camera.

All the buttons and knobs are in the right place. It is well balanced and crisp. The quality of design and thought involved in its creation is clear. Never do I have to think about how to do something or try to mold my mind to fit the camera. The camera is the one that changes to meet my photographic needs.

I’m sure this sounds like simple slash camera porn but the truth of the matter is that the D700 is a wonderful piece of photographic equipment.

Within moments of unboxing the camera, it simply felt right. Everything I had learned in using the D70 for four years was applicable. Yet, as I started using the camera, the camera faded away and the captured images took center stage. The viewfinder on the D700 is huge compared to the D70.

And, oh yes, the 17-35mm zoom is oh-so-wide again: 104 degrees to do with as I please. (On a DX camera, you only get 79 degrees for your angle of view.)

What Digital SLR Camera Should You Buy?

That is really simple. Today, you really have three choices and they cover the entire dollar range.

Nikon D700: Buy this camera if you like shooting wide, remember 35mm film and want the same feeling as when you first picked up any of the Nikon classic cameras. It really is the most wonderful camera I have used in my entire life.

Nikon D40: Here is the camera for you, if you love taking pictures with your Canon PowerShot point-n-shoot camera, but it isn’t responsive enough. You push the button to take a picture, the kid moves before the shutter fires and you end up cursing the day you ever bought the camera. This is the camera if you enjoy photography but you aren’t getting the results you want and need something a lot better but don’t want to spend an arm and a leg. The Nikon D40, for less than $400 with 18-55mm zoom lens (refurbished), is the perfect camera for you. Dad got one as a retirement present and is loving every minute of the camera. Honestly, at this price, you are getting an great DSLR for the price of a point-n-shoot.

Nikon D90: Let’s say you already have a digital SLR and it is getting a little old. Maybe you picked up a D100 or a D200 a few years back. You have first or second generation technology, want more but couldn’t justify buying a D300 even if it did have wonderful low-light sensitivity. Maybe you never shot film or, if you did, you really don’t care about angle of view. You want the best DX digital camera on the market today. The Nikon D90 is a year newer than the previous champ, the Nikon D300. While a year may not be a lot of time for some products, in the rapidly advancing world of digital cameras, a year is forever. For about what I paid for the D70 ($1,000) four years ago, you can get today’s top of the line digital DX SLR.

Notice Anything Missing in this Review?

I didn’t mention megapixels once. Here is the reason: megapixels ceased to be a factor when cameras passed the four megapixel mark. For anything up to an 8×10 print, four or six megapixels are fine. The D700 has 12 megapixels but that wasn’t even a factor in my purchase. More megapixels just mean I need more RAM and more disk space. I’d be perfectly happy with a six megapixel D700.

Got questions? Wanna express your undying love for a camera? Comment below.

Brother Mark and I woke up to temps in the low 40s Saturday. Even HE wasn’t ready to hit the road until the thermometer thawed out. He had to be in St. Louis for a concert in the evening, so we decided to do a short historical ride, starting in South Cape Girardeau.

When I worked at The Southeast Missourian, South Cape was the euphemism we used for what everyone else in town called Smelterville (or, going back even more, Leadville). It was in the area of town that frequently flooded and was inhabited almost exclusively by poor black families.

While I was still in high school, I launched myself into a daring anthropological expedition to venture into Smelterville with my camera. If I wasn’t on the road, without access to them, I’d stick in some of those old pix. I think they stand up pretty well.

None of the dire things I had been warned about happened. Instead, I found myself and my camera being invited into homes and I discovered something that served me well throughout my whole newspaper career: most folks are pretty darned nice if you treat them with respect and dignity.

You can’t fight the river

Old Man River took its toll over the years. More frequent and worse floods damaged many of the homes beyond repair; the roadbed passing through the community was raised and white flight to the suburbs opened up housing nearby that didn’t go under water. In 1996, after two “100-Year” floods in 1993 and 1995, many homes qualified for a government buyout program.

I didn’t see a single home in the area on this trip. Only the roof of this old furniture company sticks up above the roadbed.

I miss the Blue Hole

A green house trailer sits where the Blue Hole Restaurant used to serve up the best BBQ sandwiches in the area. I can remember going with my dad in his truck and wolfing down Brown Hots served on authentic Coca Cola metal trays.

The place was named after the limestone quarry next to it. When it filled with water, it looked like a Blue Hole.

Well, it sounded like a good idea

The quarry provided limestone for the Cape Cement Plant (since sold and renamed numerous times), once one of the largest employers in the area. Back before anyone ever thought about pollution control, the cement plant would billow out huge plumes of white dust that would cover everything for miles around.

The quarry started as a deep pit, and then was mined horizontally, leaving huge stone pillars to support the roofs. Back in the days of the Red Menace, I covered a city council meeting where it was discussed that those deep caverns would make a great fallout shelter.

How long can you hold your breath?

“Remember that they used to call that the Blue Hole because it fills with water if it’s not constantly being pumped out? How long do you think we could hide in those holes if the quarry filled up?” I asked innocently.

I never heard any mention of quarry-based fallout shelters again.

About 30 or 35 years ago, the pillars were blasted out and it changed to a deep pit quarry again. I managed to talk my way into the caverns to document them just before they were blown.

Everyone in Cape has heard of Fort D

Nobody ever goes to see it, but they’ve heard about it. Larry J. Summary posted this image of Cape’s forts. Fort D is the only one that has survived.

The site is nicely landscaped and the fort itself looks good until you notice that it has no roof.

Here’s an account good enough to borrow

Scott House, a retired teacher, and a member of the city’s Civil War Round Table, is leading an effort to interpret the fort’s history.

The forts were ordered built by Gen. John Fremont, the Western Department’s Union commander in St. Louis. Fremont dispatched a contingent of engineers to the town to lay out the forts. Assisting in the project was an officer, John Wesley Powell, who after the war would earn a name for himself exploring the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.

Built in the summer of 1861, the four forts formed a crescent along the outskirts of town. House said a copy of an 1865 map drawn by Army engineers, now in the Library of Congress, provided a period look at the forts‚ dimensions and their proximity to the town.

[Read more →]

It was chilly this morning and we had some Birthday Season celebrating to do, so we didn’t get on the bikes today. Bro Mark was looking for some stuff for friends, so we hit some of the Cape Girardeau antique shops.

First stop was Annie Laurie’s Antiques, which happens to be Wife Lila’s niece’s place. It was the former Ford & Son’s Funeral Home. I have to admit that it always feels strange to be standing in the viewing room where my dad’s funeral was held in 1977.

Pitchfork on sale in old viewing room

It’s particularly odd when you see a homemade pitchfork on display in the old viewing room. Reminds me of the old saw about the funeral for the meanest man in town. Just about everyone in the area attended the service, “not to honor his memory, but to make sure he was really dead.”

I bought a Souvenir Folder of Cape Girardeau, a collection of picture post card-type pictures, to compare and contrast with today’s landscapes.

We’ve come a long way

One of the first things I saw in Pastimes Antiques was a reminder of just how far we’ve come in this country. One night this week we’re watching Barak Obama stumping to be president of the United States and a day later, we’re looking at a collection of Black memorabilia of the most racially offensive nature I ever recall seeing.

There wasn’t a stereotype left untouched. Lil Black Sambo and Aunt Jemima were tame compared to this stuff.

I’m not knocking the antique shop for carrying it. It’s probably valuable to see how crap like this was acceptable at one time.

Finally found a Cape Coke bottle

Way back about the time the earth’s crust cooled, many communities had their own soft drink bottlers. Coca Cola, in particular, would manufacture their bottles with the name of the bottling city on the bottom.

I’ve kept my eye open for a Cape Girardeau Coke bottle in good condition for years, but I hadn’t found one until today. When I was a kid, we’d walk on the side of the road looking for bottles so we could collect the 2-cent deposit. I’m ashamed to admit that I would have had to harvest 600 bottles to pay for my new possession.

Neat bike

This kid’s bike has seen better days, but the really unique thing about it was that it came with a picture of the original owner.

I hit the Mother Lode

At our last stop, Spanish Street Mercantile, we hit the Mother Lode: three Central High School Girardot high school year books from my dad’s high school days. There was also a Girardot from 1947, my birth year.

A yearbook that was a year or two out of my dad’s era still had a girl’s corsage pressed between the pages and her name card in it.

Warning: non-biking content

We’re right in the middle of my mother’s 87th Birthday Season. “I’ve never had a bad one,” she says.

When we were home last year, we noticed that her washing machine was leaking. The leak had turned into a flood because the drum was rusted out at the top. When it would start to spin, the water level would rise and go out the hole. Fortunately, the washer is in the basement near a floor drain. Still, water and electricity don’t mix.

Coming Clean in 2008

Elaborate ruse.

Bro Mark and Wife Lila and I decided that we’d like to keep her around for a little longer, so we hatched a plan to replace the machine without her knowing it.

Lila found a suitable machine and arranged for it to be swapped out with the old one. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be delivered until shortly after 8 A.M. on Thursday.

Bro Mark was planning to come down from St. Louis so we could ride over to Kentucky Lake to check on mother’s mobile home Hurricane Ike damage. We had him call her Wednesday night to say that he was going to have to drop something off at his office and that was going to make him late.

We told her we’d like to go to breakfast and take a ride to look at the river to kill time until he could get into town. I snuck out to the car to give him a five-minute warning.

We ate breakfast and I called Mark to see how things were coming. He was “stuck in traffic” or something, so we put the “look at the river” plan in operation. Finally, he said that he was just about home.

2006 BDay

That darned Murphy

Before we could all get downstairs to call her with some kind of excuse, she headed down to the basement to get some blue thread and stumbled right over it.

She pretended to be cranky, but I think she liked it.

Over to Kentucky Lake

Bro Mark, Mother, Ken

It was a lousy day to ride anyway - cold front moving through with rain and wind - so we weren’t too disappointed to drive over to the Lake. Turns out the damage to the trailer wasn’t that bad, at least to our inexperienced eyes. We didn’t see any water leaks on the inside, so we think that’s a good thing.

While I was taking pictures, a neighbor wandered over and asked if we’d like one taken of the three of us.

Yep.

My mother is shy and dignified

Mother keeps a fire going in the basement fireplace to heat the basement.

BDay Season 2004

The flue goes up through the center of the house, so it keeps the kitchen and living room toasty.

She had been using a little tippy (and dippy) garden cart to haul the wood in from outside. I was afraid she was going to dump a load on her foot, so we picked up this wagon. Mother is so shy it was difficult to get her to go along with this picture in 2004. [Read more →]

That was the common graffiti in St. Louis gas station restrooms in the 60s, when the solution to pollution was dilution and raw sewage was pumped directly into the Mississippi River to become someone else’s problem downstream.

Cape Bicycle worked magic

The good folks at Cape Bicycle dug through their shelves and came with a replacement left shifter and got me back on the road late in the afternoon. (See yesterday’s post.)

While there, I was really impressed with a Surly Long Haul Trucker touring bike on the floor. It’s highly thought of by the phreds. I can see why. It’s a lot of bike for the money.

Time for a test drive

After getting a $20 flu shot, I just barely had time to get in a 12-mile ride before a cold front moved in bringing rain with it.

I used the Cape Recreational Trail to get to the south end of town, where I took city back streets to get down to the site of the Old Mississippi River Bridge which was torn down when a new bridge was built in 2003. It was a shame that the old bridge couldn’t have been left up like the Chain of Rocks Bridge in St. Louis.

I got there just in time to see a barge push by.

A quick ride to the riverfront

I hurried to get to an opening in the seawall on Water Street, but the barge was moving faster than I could. I had to content myself with a quick shot before it made it past Cape Rock.

The Mississippi River has always been a special place for me. The ocean is neat, but I can sit and watch the river flow by for hours.

As a cub reporter, I had to interview the guy who had been reading the river stages in Cape for 100 years, or so it seemed. The poor fellow had probably been interviewed by two dozen cub reporters like me.

What have you learned about the river?

“If a little boy pees in the river in St. Louis, the river will rise in Cape Girardeau.”

The Southeast Missourian was a pretty conservative paper in those days - one editor would even censor Ann Landers columns - so I’m not sure THAT quote saw print.

“Anything else?

“Big rains make big river.” (That one got in.)

Riverfront is popular

Even though downtown Cape has been in a serious decline since the seawall was constructed, the riverfront is a popular stopping place.

An impressive set of official murals grace the front and back of the wall, but chalk artists have added their own decorations.

With the sun setting, a couple leave the river front and head out toward the Common Pleas Courthouse, built in 1854.

This was just a quick hit. I’ll return to historical downtown Cape and its river later.

Thursday is going to be a non-biking day. Bro Mark and I have to go over to Kentucky Lake to check on our mother’s mobile home that took some limb hits when Hurricane Ike blew through.

I mentioned that my mother and I journeyed down Highway 61 while scouting out the New Madrid Earthquake bike route.

On the way south, we looked for a piece of property that my dad’s construction company owned in the late 50s.

Dad BUILT Route W

Steinhoff, Kirkwood and Joiner built roads and bridges all over Southeast Missouri in the 50s through the 70s. When I read Southeast Missourian Speak Out folks griping about cyclists on Route W, I think to myself, my dad BUILT Route W. I guess that gives me some right to ride on it.

Needed place to store equipment

Before long, SK&J needed a place to store equipment and a garage big enough to work on bulldozers and other earthmoving equipment.

They bought this land between Scott City and Benton and put up a mechanic’s shed / garage, a shed and several tool buildings.

Dad always wanted a big pond, so they built one on the property and stocked it with bass, crappie, blugills and catfish.

Water moccasins, turtles came on their own

I was an avid fly fisherman and loved to spend hours at the pond. The only bad thing was that you risked sharing your catch with the turtles and water moccasins.

I remember one day that dad and I had a huge stringer of fish we were looking forward to eating. One of us pulled up the stringer to add a new catch and discovered a good-sized moccasin hanging from it.

(1) It doesn’t take a Steinhoff long to look at a snake. (2) We decided that he wanted that stringer of fish more than we did.

We finally found it

After passing by a couple of likely candidates, we doubled back to a property with a pond, a mobile home, a huge brick home and a hundred plastic Halloween pumpkins in front of it.

Jim Pinkston and his son, Jamie, 20, were picking up some limbs when we pulled up.

Jim knew right away what we were talking about and he was kind enough to share this colorized aerial photo taken shortly after his father built the house at left.

“My dad bought the property in 1969 or 1970. It included the garage, shed, some tool sheds, a loading dock and 7-1/2 acres of land with the pond,” Jim said.

“He had a trucking business, so the garage was a perfect shop for him,” he continued. They hauled Styrofoam sheets for Dow when it was in Cape. They used damaged sheets on the inside of the garage for insulation. [Read more →]

No, my shiftless feeling isn’t related to my lack of employment. It’s because my front shifter went out and the local bike shop doesn’t have a replacement in stock.

I don’t pay much attention to details

I have lots of gadgets on my bike, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to components so long as they work. My left shifty thing adjusts the front gears to make me go faster or easier. My right shifty thing adjusts the rear gears to fine tune what happens related to the front gears.

I NEVER felt the need to go faster

When I bought my used Trek 1220, it came with road gears with 52 teeth on the big front chain ring. That’s so you can go fast. I never said to myself, “I’m in the big ring and I”m pedaling as fast as I can and I want to go faster.”

I HAVE said to myself, I’d sell my firstborn (sorry, Matt) for a lower gear to get up this hill.

I had Wayne (remember Wayne?) swap out the road gears for mountain bike gears with a 46-tooth big ring.

Everything worked fine for awhile

Until, that is, I went for a ride up in South GA on a cold weekend. The temps were in the mid-40s and my gears wouldn’t shift until the day warmed up. Wayne replaced the shifters and life was good again.

Let me explain something about Florida riding: we don’t have hills. We get a nosebleed when we go from the curb to the crown of the road. We diddle with gears to compensate for headwinds and tailwinds, but our low gears are mostly for show.

Compensating for altitude

Jan Norris, my old riding partner and former Palm Beach Post food editor fielded a call from a reader one day asking how much she should adjust the cooking time for altitude. Since subscribers could be anywhere in the country, Jan asked, “Where are you calling from?”

“South Palm Beach,” was the reply.

“That’s sea level,” Jan said. “You can SEE the ocean from there.”

“Yes, but I’m in a condo on the 13th floor,” the caller explained.

Do you see now why we can’t conduct an election without hosing it up?

I needed the granny yesterday

On my first hilly ride this week, I used the full range of gears. Luckily, shifting to the lower ones took just a punch of the button with my thumb. It became increasingly difficult, though, to get into the bigger gears.

Like I wrote before, my mother lives at the top of a hill, so I was in the front granny gear on the way home yesterday. When I started the downhill run this afternoon, I needed to shift up. I pushed as hard as I could with my left hand, but it wouldn’t shift. I had to reach all the way over with my right hand to get it to go.

When I passed the Cape Bicycle Shop it was still open and I stopped in to explain my problem. One of the guys looked at it and thought the cable might be binding on the kickstand plate. It was, kinda sorta, but not really.

Owner Eric Gooden took a look at it

He was hoping that it might be a frayed cable. I was, too.

I knew I was in trouble when something fell out in his hand and it wasn’t a small mouse that had crawled into the shifter when I wasn’t looking.

Bottom line: it’s broke. There might be a spare off another bike somewhere on a shelf, but if there isn’t, I’m in trouble. They are backordered.

Bro Mark is going to see if they have one in St. Louis, but it’s looking bleak. My bike is old and has seven gears in the back. Spiffy new  bikes have nine or 10, so there isn’t much demand for my flavor of parts.

This might be the excuse I need to upgrade to Shimano Dura Ace ST-7801 Dual Control Levers with matching Shimano Dura-Ace CS-7800 10-speed 12T Cassette, except that they ring in at $400 and $154 respectively, almost exceeding the cost of the bike itself. (And then I’d have to upgrade to a Shimano Dura-Ace CN-7801 10-speed Chain for another $35.)

Worst case, I’ll have them lock me into a middle-range gear and I’ll do a lot of coasting downhill and some slow pedalling or walking uphill. It’s always good to have an excuse for being slow.

Southeast Missourian webmaster James Baughn does a blog called Pavement Ends where he writes about interesting natural places to see in SE Missouri. His April 23, 2008, blog on the New Madrid Earthquake caught my eye.

Quakes are common

Little tremblors are common if you live in the area and predictions of The Next Big One come every decade or so. Kids hear about the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812 that caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards, changed the course of the river, created Reelfoot Lake and caused damage as much as 800 miles away.

James’ column mentioned a book, The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide, which costs a measly $16.95 (plus shipping).

It’s well worth the price if you are a history nut, interested in geology or watch reality TV about disasters.

I quickly found I wasn’t so much interested in reading about Pseudosesmic Landforms and Liquefaction as I was in learning that the Mississippi River used to run down the lowlands through Advance and Arkansas, with the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers being as far south as Natchez, MS, instead of Cairo, IL.

Makes sense when you look at a topo map

The Mississippi is the thin, blue line that’s meandering on the right side of the map. The lighter colors are the lowlands.

I had always heard that the high ridge that runs on the north side of 74 near Dutchtown was the old river boundary. Looks like the oldtimers were right.

What does this have to do with biking?

Seventy-seven pages into the  book, after addressing geology, history and neat disaster stuff, the authors produce the Interstate 55 Fault Finders Guide that will show you significant earthquake features on a mile marker by mile marker basis from roughly Scott City through Blytheville, AR. (They also point out that there is about a 30% chance of a small earthquake being recorded every day when you pass through this zone.)

OK, that’s great. But I can’t ride the interstate

The authors have six non-Interstate loops in the book. I picked the Benton-Sikeston Loop because it’s closest to home and put all the turns into my Garmin nüvi 760 GPS (full review). Because my mother always likes to go exploring, we hopped in her car and headed out on a scouting expedition.

Once you get to Scott City and get on Highway 61, the route is bikeable. I-55 has siphoned off most of the traffic, so I don’t think I’d feel uncomfortable on 61, even if it doesn’t have shoulders. Once you get past Benton and into Morley, the road has wide shoulders.

The backroads are good riding

The book takes you off on a bunch of side roads to look at specific land features. All of them were paved, in good condition and had hardly any traffic.

Fields of cotton will prove that the Missouri Bootheel is the Real South.

Will I bike this route?

No.

The roads are decent and there are interesting things to see, but most of it involves riding on flat roads with no shade. I get enough of that in South Florida.

Even with the guide book, I’m not enough of a geologist to appreciate the subtle changes in the environment to recognize the significance of what I’m seeing.

Still, even I am fascinated to read that the Sikeston Power Plant was built astride a major seismic fissure where the ground split open and quicksand flowed in.

My mother and I DID discover one thing that made the whole trip worthwhile. I’ll cover that later in the week.

I set out this afternoon to do what Bro Mark and I call the Uncle Gus route because it goes past a farm owned by a distant relative. It was a great day for a ride: temps were in the low 80s, the sky was overcast and the winds were mild (but increasing).

My mother lives on the top of a hill, so you start out fast until you hit a barricade at the curve at the bottom of the street where there is road construction. It’s paved, so you can dodge the barrier.

The first, gradual climb went OK. I thought that I may have remembered how to do this after all.

Muscle memory

The muscle memory was there, all right. My muscles remembered that they get REALLY tired doing this.

Nothing around here has just one name. Depending on who you talk to, the road I was on is called Old Jackson Road (unless you’re in Jackson, where it’s called Old Cape Road), or Three Mile Creek Road (remember Cape LaCroix Creek from yesterday? Same creek.) On the map, it’s CR 620. At one time, it was the Houck Railroad.

Big rock went boom

That brings us to this picture. Back in The Day, this was called the Houck Railroad Cut and was a path blasted through the limestone just big enough for a train to pass through. The railroad turned into a regular road and, in the 60s, my dad’s construction company was given the job to make the cut wider.

Someone misjudged the powder load and a huge boulder the size of a kitchen table was launched up, up, up until the law of gravity kicked in. It went right through the roof of a nearby house. No one was hurt, but it became part of family lore ever after.

The road has been widened again, so most folks who drive through there would never know to think of Louis Houck and his railroad.

What goes up comes down

If you check out the ride profile, you’ll see lots of pointy things. Those are hills. A lot of them are more than 12%.

It takes a lot longer to go UP those hills than it does to go down them. I stopped at the top of one of them to see that my GPS said I was at 524 feet above sea level. On the way down, I saw 37 mph on the speedometer. Unfortunately, when I finished coasting, I was at almost exactly 524 feet again and still had about another 150 feet of 12+% grade to climb. [Read more →]

I’m visiting my mother in Cape Girardeau, MO, a Mississippi River town halfway between St. Louis and Memphis.

I get back here at least once a year to recharge my psychic batteries in an area that has real hills, real trees and real people, all of which are sometimes in short supply in SFL.

Way back in the last century when I was a kid, Cape LaCroix Creek - known to locals as Three-Mile Creek - would overflow and flood homes and businesses every few years.

Got fed up with it

The Local Fathers got fed up with complaints from the wet folks and managed to scrape up enough money to make the creek run more efficiently and drain off the water before it spilled over its banks.

A side effect of that was the Cape LaCroix Recreational Trail, a 4.2-mile paved multiuse path, that was created next to the creek.

The trail starts (or ends, depending on your perspective) just down the hill from the old homestead, so I ride it several times when I visit. It’s fun meeting folks and it’s a great way to get from the north end of town to the south end without climbing a bunch of hills.

Arguably the most-used park in town

I’ve never been on it without meeting tens of bikers, roller bladers, joggers, walkers, families with strollers and dog walkers. I’ve often thought that it’s the most-used park in town, particularly if you define “use” as “actively participate” and not just “spectate.” It attracts all ages and demographic groups.

Other paths I’ve ridden seem to attract mostly local users: elderly folks who do short exercise rides in the evening, kids going to their friends’ houses or (on the Withlacoochee) an old guy who would walk to the convenience store with a small shopping cart to pick up the week’s supply of beer. I assumed this trail would be the same, especially since it’s so short.

Trail draws users for miles around

This afternoon I ran into a category of rider that local governments should take into consideration when people gripe about building public facilities like this one.

The first person I encountered was pulling a child’s trailer with a huge cooler and other stuff it in. When I got closer, I saw he had a toddler in a bike seat behind him. Up ahead was his wife with another toddler, a young girl and another adult couple.

They explained that they had driven to Cape from the Farmington, MO, area to ride the trail and have a picnic alongside it. Farmington is about an hour’s drive from Cape. Let’s review that: two families had loaded two cars with bicycles, snacks, toddlers as young as 18 months and driven close to 100 miles round trip so they could do a sub-10-mile bike ride because there weren’t any good facilities close at hand.

Cash registers were going to ring

Oh, yeah, and while they were in Cape primarily to ride their bikes, they were also going to do some shopping.

[Editor's note: I am horribly embarrassed to admit that I stuck a digital recorder under their noses and very carefully recorded every name so I could mention them. Unfortunately, Murphy was riding along with me and ate the info. The only name I can remember was 8-year-old Kendra who thought riding was "good excercise and a lot of fun, but I think it might make me lose too much weight."]

Not the only one

I would have thought they were an anomaly until I found the Cerneys who drove 30 miles from Illinois to ride the trail. The said that they had often seen riders on the trail when they came into Cape for shopping and they decided to bring their bikes along for a ride.

After giving their names, Mr. Cerney asked, “Don’t you want our ages?”

“Sure,” I replied. “I just didn’t think it was polite to ask.”

“I’m 72 and Jane is 71,” he said. (I should be drinking what they’re drinking.)

Finally, local riders

On the way back home, I ran into the Schroeders just as they were entering the Cape Woods Conservation Area on their way to the Osage Center to watch her brother play flag football. They thought they’d take their bikes since it was such a nice afternoon.

Well maintained

The Cape area has had several flash floods this year that  put the trail under some raging waters. I was curious to see if there would still be debris, rocks and gravel across it. It was spotless. Part of the credit goes to the local bicycle club which conducts periodic cleanup sessions.

This just goes to show that parks don’t have to have expensive lights and facilities to attract a large number of users, some from out of town with money to spend to bolster the local economy.

The only negative I can see is the local Letters to the Editor Yahoos who gripe, “Why are people riding their bikes in the street when we built them that nice bike path.”