NAUVOO TO BURLINGTON TO KEITHSBURG

May 26, Tuesday
22 miles

We have two new Trail Angels to add to our list. My brother Dave and his wife RuthAnn got home about midnight Monday night and we were able to chat and have breakfast with them before we loaded up out bikes into Dave's van and headed for Bikkel's Bike Shop in Burlington Iowa, across the river. I was very impressed with the shop. It had all of the amenities of a "big city" shop which we haven't seen for many miles. I had both front and back tires replace with tires that are a bit wider and very durable for touring. Also got my computer up and running again! Bought new bike gloves. The old ones were getting pretty thread bare. A new rear view mirror was on the list because the little mirror had just disappeared off of the stem one day. ?? Rusty found a book on bike trails in Wisconsin that will make that part of our ride a lot less stressful. So by the time we left the bike shop we had become a couple of their "valued" customers.
Dave took us and all our gear back over to the Illinois side and up the road a ways to start our ride. He helped us get loaded up, took a couple of "send off" pictures and waved us off. It was about 1:00 by now but we wanted to get some miles in for the day.
We rode 22 miles to a free state campground outside of Keithsburg. Rain had been forecast for the day and started just as our tent was set up and our gear was stashed safely inside. It rained off and on until about 7:30p when it started in steady with thunder in the distance.
It felt good to be back on the road again after what turned out to be a long R&R. We were going to have to get back in shape again so a short first day felt good.