This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.
Katy Trail State Park is a 240 mile shared-use trail converted from the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. Growing up in Columbia, it’s a site I visited multiple times with my family (at the Rocheport section), but Brooke and I made multiple visits to the St. Charles section of the trail shortly after moving to St. Louis. Now that we live in Marshall, we live about 30 minutes away from the Sedalia portion of the trail, ironically making it closer than it has ever been to the two of us.
As Brooke and I are the only two in the house capable of riding a bicycle (sans training wheels…), we picked up a trailer for my bike last year that we can put the kids in. It folds up in the back of our Forester pretty easily, though by the time you put our bikes on the roof rack of the car and the front tires of said bikes in the back with the folded-up trailer, we’re mostly out of room (i.e. we can go to Sedalia, Boonville or Rocheport pretty easily, but not much further, as we don’t have room for overnight bags).
For now, the kids like riding in the trailer and we use it on trips to the local playground here in Marshall. Meg is 6, but is still relatively small, so she fit in the trailer easily last year and this year – next summer may be a different story. Hopefully, we can get Meg riding her bike over the next year, but Calvin will still be able to use the trailer for years to come.
Honestly, there isn’t much to write about here. The trail picture above is what it looks like for 240 miles. It goes through/near some small towns, sometimes there are bathroom facilities available (though usually not), some sections are shaded while others aren’t. It’s a great State Park to visit, but personally, we like biking on it more than anything else. It’s a “mixed use” trail, so we see walkers and joggers frequently, though closer to cities – the further you get from the cities, the more likely you’ll find bikers. Some sections, especially near the State Fairgrounds in Sedalia, also allow for horses, but we don’t often see them on the trail.
Ultimately, it’s a really awesome resource that’s unique in that quite a few Missourians have been on it, likely without knowing it’s a State Park. It isn’t a “single destination” like the other State Parks because it spans the entire state (as in, you can live in Kansas City or you can live in St. Louis, and you can visit the same park while only driving for 20 or 30 minutes to get there). I suspect the kids will both have fond memories of this one.