Dave Shinall

Dave is a retired Army tank platoon sergeant. During Desert Storm, he helped overrun a Republican Guard bunker complex in Iraq's Euphrates Valley. In the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, he commanded a mountaintop UN Preventive Deployment Force observation post on the Macedonian frontier with Serbia. In Bavaria, he served as news director at the American Forces Network radio station in Wurzburg, on special duty assignment from December 1981 to March 1984. He's a 2003 magna cum laude graduate of Western Kentucky University.

Dave's ridden his bicycle across Missouri four times on the magnificent Katy Trail State Park. Stretching 237.7 miles, from the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to Clinton, Mo., about 85 miles southeast of Kansas City, the Katy Trail is the nation's longest rail-trail. Dave has canoed Northern Bavaria's Wiesent River, Montana's Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, Missouri's Current River, the Wabash and Ohio rivers, from Vincennes, Ind., to Cave-in-Rock, Ill., the full 107-mile length of Florida's Apalachicola River, the Lower Cumberland River, the Lower Sabine River, the Lower Red River of the South, Southern Illinois' Cache River, Kentucky's Green River, Tennessee's Lower Duck River and the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway. He's also canoed atop the world's largest volcano at Yellowstone Lake. 

With his wife Tova, he's climbed a Mayan pyramid in Mexico, cave tubed in Belize, drunk a toast at the grave of Meriwether Lewis, and driven and camped the 444 miles of the Natchez Trace Parkway. He plans further descents of Montana's Upper Missouri River and still more Katy Trail rides. He and Tova keep on traveling.