St. Louis, MO to Hermann, MO — 74.4 mi, 2428 ft
Today officially marks one third of our trip and the first day I’m feeling like this is normal, like biking 75 miles today is just the thing we do. As the driver yesterday, I was feeling a bit like a chud for missing the team’s first century, especially as they rode into the majestic St. Louis Arch. I looked longingly at my six little cyclists crossing the Mississippi, entering the big Gateway Into the West. It was the first time that being the driver felt unfulfilling instead of a glorious rest day. The switch had finally flipped for me. I had begun to enjoy biking.
To be honest, I was never in Spokes for the act of biking itself. Biking is not some all-time favorite activity in the world to the point where I’d want to do it all day every day. Since we’ve all been sharing our reasons on the blog recently, I joined Spokes mainly to meet amazing strangers I would’ve otherwise never met and see parts of middle America I would’ve otherwise never gone to, and hang out every day while doing it. And sure, part of me enjoys a physical challenge; and sure, biking is a cool way to do it. Today we hit the things I love about Spokes, and so I had an amazing day. Perhaps the half of the team whose goal is to bike to the end of the route every day as fast as possible wouldn’t agree with me. But I’m the narrator in this story.
Today I woke up on the floor in St. Louis after a night of waking up every twenty minutes from Drew’s loud snores in the sleeping bag across from me. Nate had gotten up in the middle of the night to move his sleeping bag in the other room; even their bromance couldn’t will him to stay the night. As everyone started waking up and getting ready, the mood was quite joyful as it usually is in the mornings after biking 100 miles. For breakfast, we feasted on the peaches and cherries I had bought from a farm yesterday as a treat for the bikers. Then we took a 10 minute nap while Caroline posted some blogs. Then we met our host, Alex. We were staying in his second apartment of sorts, and we weren’t able to meet him the night before because we arrived so late, although he had put a delicious homemade pasta shell bake in the fridge for us upon arrival. He came dressed in my favorite biker outfit I’ve seen to date: a biker shorts + biker jersey version of a traditional Oktoberfest lederhosen, complete with adidas sneakers with custom-fitted bike clips. He said he’d take us around St. Louis on our way out of the city, and I already knew he would show us a lit time.
We headed out towards Forest Park, St. Louis’ version of Central Park, where Tatiana managed to run into the one person she knew in all of St. Louis (shoutout Greta) and where we got a mini history lesson of St. Louis courtesy of Alex. St. Louis was the site of the official handover of the Louisiana Purchase from the French to the US in 1803, and served as the starting point of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the new territory in 1804. Combined with its key placement at the junction of America’s two largest rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, and the rise of the steamboat and the railroad, it quickly became the “Gateway to the West” (quite literally, with the famous Gateway Arch built in 1965). The city is also notable for hosting both the 1904 World Fair and the 1904 Summer Olympics, both of which happened in the park we were biking through, and both of which were kind of insane events.
The 1904 World Fair was held in St. Louis to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, and the 1904 Summer Olympics were held in St. Louis because the city threatened to hold a rivaling international competition in the same timeframe if Chicago didn’t transfer their hosting rights. Let’s discuss the World Fair first. It ran for seven months with a total of 20 million attendees from 62 countries (how did they even get halfway across the world back then??). Important inventions unveiled include the wireless telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, the earliest version of the fax machine by Elisha Gray, the X-ray machine by Wilhelm Conrad Ronteg, the infant incubator (where neonatal babies in rudimentary ICU units were just on display for the fair) by E. M. Bayliss, the personal automobile, Dr. Pepper, and the world’s first “Airship Contest” (nobody won). The fair also had PEOPLE exhibits, where indigenous peoples including Filipino, Tlingit, Patagonian, Ainu, and Mbuti people were just on display in the name of “Anthropology”, along with a full reenactment of the Second Boer War with veterans from the British army against veterans from South African native villages (admission to watch was 25 cents), and a bullfight riot. Hellen Keller gave a lecture at the fair along with J. T. Stinson, who then spoke the famous phrase “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And Jack Daniel won the Gold Medal for the finest whiskey in the world.
The 1904 Olympics were equally weird. This was the first time the Games had been held outside of Europe (the first two Games were awarded to Athens and Paris), and the first time the 3-medal format of gold, silver, and bronze was introduced. The ongoing Russo-Japanese War prevented many top-class athletes from traveling to St. Louis, so only around 10% of the competing athletes came from outside the US and Canada. Highlights include the American gymnast George Eyser, who won six medals despite his left leg being made of wood, and Frank Kugler, who won medals in wrestling, weightlifting, and tug of war (a real Olympic sport from 1900-1920). They also made a hundred indigenous people from across the world who were brought to St. Louis for the World Fair compete in a bunch of sports for the crowd 😭 The craziest event of this all was the 1904 marathon, which “was run during the hottest part of the day [3:00 pm] on dusty country roads with minimal water supply [to conduct research on ‘purposeful dehydration’]; while 32 athletes… competed, only 14 managed to complete the race, which was a bizarre affair due to poor organization and officiating. While Frederick Lorz was greeted as the apparent winner, he was later disqualified as he had hitched a ride in a car for part of the race. The actual winner, Thomas Hicks, was near collapse and hallucinating by the end of the race, a side effect of being administered brandy, raw eggs, and strychnine [rat poison] by his trainers. The fourth-place finished, Andarin Carvajal, took a nap during the race after eating spoiled apples” (Wikipedia). The 1904 marathon Wikipedia page is one of my favorites.
This mini-history lesson was for my ever-curious mom, who informed me that she would like to hear more about the places we travel through. Back to scheduled programming.
After our layover in Forest Park, Alex took us to Kaldi’s Coffee, where we ordered four different types of lattes to split and went round-robin style around the table taking a sip of each before passing it on. Drew enjoyed the carrots that came as a side of his kid’s menu grilled cheese and Nunu enjoyed her coffees without worrying about where to poop after.
We finally headed out of St. Louis at some late time I can’t remember because I never really check the clock throughout the day, usually relying on my Type A teammates to tell me to get a move on. We sped through West St. Louis through Wash U’s gorgeous campus and mansion-esque estates with perfectly manicured lawns, a direct contrast to the economically depressed post-industrial East St. Louis we had biked through yesterday. Interesting how the Mississippi river segregates the haves and the have-nots…
The first rest stop was at a butterfly farm (!) with a snow cone truck (!) and a carousel ride (!). I felt like little kids again as we tried it all: we stuffed our face with Cheez-Its before getting snow cones, where Tatiana tried to ditch the snow cone itself and put her mouth straight below the syrup taps, then went to the creepy beetles and tarantulas exhibits where we pressed our faces against the glass to better watch the gross bugs do their gross things. Drew had a tarantula put on his face that we all found the courage to give a little pet to (he was missing his bedmate from Pam’s place). He tried to adopt it but the lady at the front desk had to explain to him that that’s not how museums work. Then when we went to the butterfly greenhouse, Carmen was the one who tried to sneak a butterfly into her pocket to take with her and the disappointed conservatory lady gave her a lecture on ecosystem preservation and even recommended her some books to read. I was the chosen one that a butterfly landed on and stayed for almost five minutes! Usually when I’ve gone to butterfly farms there’s not really a lot of butterflies and they’re all kind of shy and hiding. I’ve never seen so many huge butterflies zipping all around you so fast as I did at Sophia M. Sach’s Butterfly House.
At this point, the team was getting hungry so we decided to have lunch at our very first rest stop for the first time ever, instead of waiting for the second or third like usual. Caroline had the brilliant idea to finally pull out this fat sausage that Ann had donated to our team back in Virginia, which was actually so delicious that everyone on the team went round robin just taking chomps out of it. This lunch was also notable for being the first time we pulled out our plastic cutlery that Theresa had gifted us also back in Virginia; we had previously just been spreading communal guac and hummus with our fingers. Our team was getting a little antsy now because we were only 20 miles in on our 75 mile day and it was already afternoon. But Nate still insisted on our entire team riding the carousel together before we left, even though he was the day’s driver and easily could’ve gone himself after we’d left.
On the next leg, Caroline suffered some intense elbow pain and unfortunately had to SAG out—her pinky had been numb since the very beginning of the trip and the pain had spread outward up the nerve across the arm. Caroline is one of the people on the team who NEVER complains (even after getting bit by a dog) so if she was finally voicing her pain, I knew it must’ve been really bad. We had finally reached the Katy Trail, a 240-mile rail trail meant for biking across all of Missouri, which we rode until our second rest stop on a pier of the Missouri river. While waiting for us, Caroline had somehow managed to swim the entire width of the Missouri and back (approximately half a mile) in rapid fast current, barely making it upstream with the help of a beaver who pulled along the log she was holding on to for a couple minutes when she was close to shore. Apparently backstroke is good for elbow recovery. I still don’t understand why Caroline and Nate (who went on a 3-mile run) refuse to just take their rest days.
Pretty soon after we left the second rest stop, we started hearing thunder and seeing lightning. We heard Nunu and Tatiana’s yelps before we actually saw any lightning; both of them are so scared of thunderstorms that they immediately got off their conductive metal bikes and started running the 1.5 mile back to the nearest trailhead rest stop at Augusta, MO, leaving Drew, Carmen, and I to walk their bikes back. The little trail town turned out to be a ghost town with three normal-looking storefronts whose insides were just creepy empty floorboards. Nunu went inside the one labeled “HOSTEL” looking for a bathroom and literally fell a few feet through one of the floorboards; Carmen had to reach her foot down into the pit for her to grab onto to hoist her back up, with Nunu almost pulling off her shorts and leg sleeves. Unable to hold her bladder during the 20 minutes this ordeal took, note that Nunu peed in the pit before getting excavated from the situation. Drew would’ve probably been the better person for this job but he had disappeared deeper into the ghost town in an attempt to hunt down a cheeseburger, following his one-track mind even amidst a thunderstorm. We passed the rest of the time in the rain less eventfully: I listened to Drew’s old piano-playing and airplane-flying videos from high school, while Nunu updated our team’s Instagram and Tatiana read some NYTimes articles. Finally when the lightning stopped, it was too late (past 7 PM) to finish our route and Nate came to SAG us all. We had a delicious pizza dinner courtesy of Philly’s Pizza in Marthasville (one of the best of the trip, and we’ve had a LOT of pizza on this trip) before heading to our Airbnb perfectly along the Katy Trail, kindly donated to us by Kate Engelmann. Notably today was also the day our car’s name finally came to us. The true name of the car will only be known by Spokes 2026 members, but ask me nicely and I’ll reveal its pseudonym.
That’s all for today!
Aarushi ❤
PS: There are 15 lies in this blog, can you spot them all?
MIT Spokes 2026 
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