Last month I talked about my internship at the Hermann Wurst Haus. I’ve seen a few sale barn friends at the store in Hermann and I’m still having a good time conquering jobs ranging from peppering bacon to smoking beef jerky. However, when my co-worker Sara and I got the chance to get out of the shop for a weeklong road trip, we took off in the Wurst Haus food truck without looking back. The shop supported the Big BAM (Bicycle Across Missouri) as the Official Brat Sponsor of the ride across north Missouri. For the brave bike riders, the race meant a 300-mile trek from Rock Port to Kirksville. The ride stopped in 22 towns including overnight stays in Rock Port, Maryville, Albany, Unionville and Kirksville. Community members opened up fairgrounds and baseball fields to entertain and house the 1100 bikers that rode all or part of the week.

While Sara and I didn’t brave camping, we had plenty of adventures of our own. Like any good optimist, I expected the week to be a fairly smooth flow of sales and hour long drives through the beautiful north Missouri hills. My first doubt of this plan came when we whipped into Sonic in Macon, Missouri. Having only driven 2 hours, we were surprised when our truck did not start! Sara’s dad talked us through the step-by-step of wiggling cables under the hood, and eventually we were back on the road. We made our second stop at the Macon Orsheln’s to buy a $3 plier and recruit a stranger to help us fix our loose connection.

We ran into our second struggle the next night. The local economic development sponsor was quite surprised to see two girls and our truck packed full of brats. It turned out our name was left off the list and we were the only booth not owned by a community member. One of the goals of the Big BAM was to stimulate local economies by providing businesses the chance to set up booths while the 22 bands performed through the week. After getting the obligatory ok to set up our tent we drug our 6 full coolers, set up a table and prepped our little grill. Before even starting the grill, we had our first visitor. The county health inspector wanted to know if we had a license to be vending (nope), but we filled it out on the spot, set up the required hand washing station, rearranged our coolers and were back in action. Sara is totally sweet and said the kindest things like, “thanks for letting us know, this health inspection pamphlet will be super helpful.” No one can stay mad at that! Ten-minutes later a city police officer stopped by, did we have insurance that covered being on the road? (It took some digging, but yes.) We decided that these visitors were not that fun after all and while our booth was buzzing with activity no one had left with a brat. We got the feeling the local businesses were trying to run our traveling brat mobile out of town! In the end, we peddled our “Official Brat of the Big BAM” but we were sure happy to keep heading east where we spent the rest of the week making only friends!

Aside from a few small bumps in the road and one detour that took us to Iowa, we had a great time! The evening sales job had its perks and everyday we struggled to be out of our hotel by 11 am. Mornings by the pool and waking up just in time to catch the end of the free breakfast will be greatly missed now that I am back in the real world. The bike ride was scheduled to end in Canton, Missouri on Friday. However, there was flooding over the majority of roads and all safe detours would have forced the riders to bike over 100 miles on Friday. While I often hear farmers talking about the weather, the perspective of bikers pedaling in high heat and lots of rain was equally as strong. While most of the riders were sad they wouldn’t be able to dip their tires in the Mississippi River, I think they felt a sense of relief knowing another day of hills was not on the docket. With car rides and real beds in near future, the band played until late in Kirksville and happy bikers bought brats until we folded up our tent at midnight.

Savannah Angell