Pony Express Here I Come

Heading to St Joseph MO to do the first segment of the Pony Express Trail.  

The trail starts in St Joseph and finishes in Sacramento CA. My friends and I are doing the 1st segment of the ride (there are 5 segments) which ends in Kearny NE. For logistal reasons, we are starting in Kearny and ending in St Joseph as it was decided that this was the better direction. 

I am going with some guys I meet on the Santa Fe Trail Ride a couple of years ago plus one other friend that joined us for our Nachez Trace ride. We lost one rider to a dislocated shoulder. We are sagging so this means that we share transporting our gear each day as well as to provide rider support. Total trip should be about 400 miles and we plan on taking 7 days to complete.  

The trip is mostly gravel, so racking up more than 50 miles in a day will be a challenge. First time on gravel for me. I re-built my 1995 Trek Mountain bike to handle the gravel (50mm tires, a tune up , larger rear cassette, etc). In hindsight I should have bought a new bike - but there is no more room in my bike workshop ("8 is enough").

My bike has now shipped and waiting for me in St Joseph’s MO. I decided to include a Apple Air Tag in the bag and I tracked it from the time it left Florida to the time it arrived at my friend's house in Missouri. Pretty interesting to see where the bike travelled with UPS.  First day the bike travelled over 900 miles.

We doing a combination of camping and hotelling.  To be honest there were not a lot of choices on where to stay - so we focused on staying in locations as close to the trail as we could find that also have food options for breakfast and dinner.

That worked in most places except Oak NE (pop. 55 and the 473rd largest city in Nebraska ) where the only campground was labelled as "primative".  Which meant no running water and no indoor toilets. One of the riders, Russ was able to work some magic with some fellow churchgoers and he found us a place behind the "school" that supposedly have some flush toilets. Should be fun!

I take a flight to Kansas City on Weds 6/2002023 and the ride begins on Thursday. I am hoping we get to tour a lot of historical sites as this is the actual trail that the Pony Express riders took to deliver the mail out west.  

Here are some quick videos about the ride.

Pony Express Trail Video 1

Pony Express Trail Video 2