US50 Phase 1: North-Central Missouri

Oct 10 Wandering North Central Missouri

 

Today was all about wandering around north central Missouri to see if this is a ‘just have to move here’ kind of place.



Well yeah, since I'm hiking isn't this just
stating the obvious??

Went up to Kirksville, closer to the Iowa boarder than not, to check out the town. This town seems to be the dividing line when it comes to winter weather. The northern plains weather comes this far down into Missouri then seems to stop. Of course that's a generalization and there are exceptions, but it's true often enough that's what people say.

 

This is a college town so it's reasonably vibrant and there are a few nice old buildings. All-in-all decent enough place though I didn’t see as many restaurant chains as I expected, not like back in Athens OH or Bloomfield IN, both also college towns. I guess college kids around this part of the country don’t eat, or wait tables?!




Nice woods

Really nice lake with views

 Leaving Kirksville I went over to the nearby Thousand Hills State Park where I spent the better part of the day hiking the hills around the lake there. (But I didn't hike 1000 of them!) Day tripping in Missouri state parks is free, at least it was at this one. This is a nice park wrapped around Forest Lake and has some decent hiking as well as boating opportunities. The timing was great too. A nice day with some hints of fall showing. There are some private properties along the road into the state park with some really nice houses but I noticed that there were a whole lot of for sale signs along there, something like 6 of the 20 houses were for sale. Not sure what that means.



Lots of interesting trails

From there I worked my way to the southwest on some lesser roads to check out two potentially interesting  properties for sale. They were apparently nearly side by side at the end of an even lesser road, but that road turned out to be so 'lessor' I would have been scraping the sides of the van on the trees as they eventually choked out the road. This was supposed to be a maintained county road and not some long private driveway! At this point I considered pulling off somewhere and walking the rest of the way in, but decided we wouldn't be interested in road-building just to get into our property so just turned around instead - well - backed up and backed up and backed up - then finally turned around. 

Oh well, I had one more property back towards the southeast to check out anyway. It’s more into row-crop land in that direction but the description of the property was interesting and it didn’t look bad on Google Earth either. Turns out it wasn’t horrible, but wasn’t great either.



And great scenery

After all that I made it back to the campground just in time to get picked up for dinner again, on the grill at  Gail and John’s place this time. At the end of the evening I said my goodbyes and once again Tammie dropped me off at the campground on her way home.