Day 52---Time to head back to Berkeley?, Dickinson ND

I slept better last night, better than I had the last few nights, but after 9 hours of sleep, I still felt completely spent.  I had some numbers I had to get back to the office in SF this morning, so I had breakfast around 7, and what a lovely breakfast it was!  Lots of fresh fruit, bagels, cream cheese, cheese, four kinds of juice, herbal teas, and biscuits and gravy.  The nicest motel breakfast this side of California (turns out the owners are from Modesto), and I was actually hungry enough to enjoy it.

I got my work done, feeling super tired, and after much agonizing over the heavy headwind forecast, I decided  I was going to take the day off, which meant that I’d have to fly back to SF from Bismarck, rather than Fargo. This was going to put me seriously behind ‘schedule’ in terms of meeting friends and family in Michigan, and would mean that for the next 1000 miles I’d have no company.  A sobering thought, but I couldn’t muster the energy to be on the road again today.

I went back to sleep for a bit, then did some research on flights out of Bismarck.  Turned out I could get back via Denver, as well as Minneapolis, so there were plenty of options.  So I showered (a rare morning treat on these bike tours) and headed over to the Ukrainian Cultural Institute.  I met the new office manager, Shannon, whose husband was Ukrainian-American.  She had grown up on a farm outside Kenmare, which is where my great Uncle Ed Verbitsky farmed (grandmother Mabel’s youngest brother).  She was too young to know any of my family, but for people in North Dakota, having relatives from your town is usually something to talk about. J  She was new to the Institute, but told me that they had just had their annual festival in mid-July.  The Ukrainians around Dickinson were all either orthodox or catholic, not the protestant sects that settled around Kief and Butte, where my dad’s family is from. 

While I was there, Teresa showed up, who is one of the board members.  She’s three years older than I, and was a huge source of information about ND Ukrainians.  Apparently until the mid-90s, she took her kids up to Butte for Ukrainian dancing, and she knew quite a few of the families from around Butte and Kief, some of whom were cousins.  In fact, she showed me that they had copies of the Kief Centennial book from 2008, and she was excited to go through it with me to see pictures of various of my family members that she might have met over the years.

A cool experience for sure, and a bit of what I had been hoping to do with my family when we first planned to have my dad meet me and my siblings here in North Dakota.   I had really been looking forward to hearing about all this stuff from my dad and other relatives.

After my visit, I headed for Bogey’s Diner, which everyone had assured me was a great little diner downtown.  I was served a dried out hamburger, on a stale roll, with onion rings that had clearly defrosted before being put in the fryer, and arrived so grease laden as to be almost inedible.  I soldiered through lunch, because I was hungry.  After lunch I went to the local market, Dan’s, which had the same poor choices of food I’d seen for days and days.  The produce was a tad better, but the baked goods were the usual donuts and sad looking breakfast pastries, which I’ve learned are mostly sugar and very little flavor.  I picked out a poppyseed muffin, and a couple of peaches, which I thought I could eat in the middle of the night if I woke up hungry.

I wandered back to the motel via the Dickinson State University campus, which had a couple of nice old buildings.  I was super depressed about my trip, the meal at Bogey’s was kind of the last straw, and really felt like I just couldn’t continue on for another thousand miles alone.  When I got back to the motel, I checked the United website and found that I could easily get a flight home tomorrow, via Denver.  It was now 5 PM and I found the local bike shop (which is called Steffan Saw and Bike, as they are the chain saw dealer too), and called to ask if they had any bike boxes.  They did, and would be open again tomorrow at 8:30.

I made a couple of calls to friends and family to talk about bailing, and everyone was the same, “if it’s not fun, and you’re not enjoying yourself, why continue?”  I decided to go home a few days early, eat well, rest, and feel rested and prepared for the Board retreat next weekend.  I started to catch up on my blog from the last three days, and had an early night, wanting to get some more sleep.

Day 51---Mind and body in full rebellion, Beach to Dickinson

62.3 miles, 5:55, 10.5 mph

I didn't take a single picture today.

I didn’t sleep well again last night, and only dozed fitfully after about 4 AM.  I had the same stomach issues, which must be anxiety related, and couldn’t eat more than a banana at first this morning.  I made 4 slices of peanut butter toast, which I took back to my room, and tried to eat them a little at a time while I alternately packed, and laid back in bed. 

Today was supposed to a cool day of cycling, with a very mild sidewind, through the North Dakota badlands, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  Teddy came out to North Dakota after the death of his young wife and his mother in quick succession in the 1880s, and this was where he regained his mojo.  All I could think was that I was losing mine here.

I thought that maybe the long day yesterday, fueled by endorphins and the wind, and the companionship at dinner, were part of the reason I just didn’t want to get on my bike----ever again.  I’ve never encountered such a low moment in my cycle touring years, and struggled to understand what is going on.

So I made a bargain with myself, get to Medora, 24 miles away, check out the National Park, have a hot meal, and then decide if you want to go further.  That worked, and I got out finally by around 8 AM, again many hours after being up.  It was back on the freeway, the only paved route, and it was a lot of climbing and descending as I headed into the badlands.  A nice descent into Medora, which is a lovely little town (like Wibaux MT, also started by a French nobleman) and I headed for the Cowboy Café, which I’d read was a local institution.  By now I was feeling a bit hungry, and had the sausage and pancake breakfast. I couldn’t eat it all, as my stomach was still bugging me (anxiety or a bug?, probably the former, as there was no evidence of the latter).  I went over to the visitor center, used my parks pass, and the ranger asked me if I planned to cycle around the loop road.

I thought, oh, how nice it would be to just dump my stuff at a motel, and do a bit of the loop road today.  And then, I thought about how nasty the headwinds were forecast for tomorrow, and how I didn’t want to cycle the 45 miles into Dickinson in heavy headwinds.  Once again, making progress, scheduling and the weather were driving my decision.

I did spend some time in the visitor center, which was full of interesting exhibits and information.  I heard two guys making plans with a ranger for an overnight backpacking trip, and it was nice to be in a place again where people were doing fun things, rather than just being in dreary town after dreary town.  North Dakota really seems to have more life going on so far.

Too soon, I was back on the road, and the big climb up from the Little Missouri River.  About three miles into the climb out, it started to get a bit warm, and I cursed myself for not having a nice tour around the park, and staying in Medora.

I got to the little town of Belfied, about 15 miles later, to find it completely overwhelmed with oil boom truck traffic.  The motel had rooms, so I had a sandwich and juice at---Cenex----and watched the constant stream of tired looking, sweaty oil workers come into the place.  Almost all white, and all male, and mostly out of shape, you could see that these were the Bush/Romney crowd, men who didn’t care that they were destroying our planet, one well at a time.  They reminded me of a couple of guys I’d heard at the bar in Circle, going on and on about Obama, and how we really need that Keystone XL pipeline.  I decided after a bit, that no matter how tired and bad I felt, I wasn’t going to stay in a motel full of oil workers, next to an ugly freeway interchange tonight.

So I headed to old US 10, the quiet, 20 mile route along the Heart River valley to Dickinson.  Other bloggers had sung its praises, and I was looking forward to it.  Wrong.  It had just been chip sealed and was covered in new gravel for 20 miles.  Sigh.  Just what I wanted, 20 miles of gravel.  I turned around, went back up the hill and got back on the freeway shoulder.

The shoulder was wide, but there was a huge amount of truck traffic between Belfield, which is on US 85, the major north/south route through the Bakken oil formation, and Dickinson, which is the major oil service center for the southern part of the oil fields.  I was starting to get a headwind, so in some ways the trucks were a blessing, as they passed far enough to my left for me to feel safe, but then broke the wind.

Unfortunately the freeway headed straight over the rolling prairie, so it was a lot of up and down, and I was getting more and more tired.  I could see old US 10 winding along the river valley in the distance, missing most of the hills, but then when it got close to the freeway, I could see the trucks clearly violating the 35 mph speed limit and spraying gravel everywhere.  I counted my blessings, and trudged onward.

As I got into Dickinson, it looked just like the ugly suburbs north of Dallas or outside Oklahoma City.  No surprise, given the roots of the people calling the oil shots here, but confronted with it out here on the northern prairie, it was quite jarring.  Boomtown USA.   The road into town had just been paved, and it was a nice smooth ride past many construction sites and hundreds of loose nails that had been jarred loose from someone’s vehicle.

I had called the Oasis Motel from Belfield, to see if they had a room.  They had good TripAdvisor reviews, and their rooms were only $100. The big chains with rooms at that price were full, and most of the others were in the $150-200 range, so I felt lucky that they had rooms.  I was greeted at the motel by another lovely older woman, Doris, who is the manager.  We chatted a bit about the boom, and the sorry state of the exterior of the hotel (apparently it’s hard to get painters and the hotel was being renovated, quite nicely I might add).  She also clued me into a local restaurant known for its Ukrainian style borscht.

I cleaned up, headed out, super tired, and went to Jacks, which looked like any other of the tens of family style restaurants I’ve been at over the last two months.  Same smell too.  However, you could get borscht with your fried chicken dinner, so I did.  It was yummy, not quite as good as Grandma Mabel’s, but deeply satisfying.  The chicken and ubiquitous french fries were not so satisfying, and again I couldn’t eat all my dinner, so I packed up the chicken breast to take back to the hotel.

The owner was the cashier and he asked how I liked the meal.  I told him the borscht was almost as good as my North Dakota grandmother’s and he beamed, and said, ‘we want it to be almost as good as grandmother’s because no one’s is ever as good as grandmother’s.’  A wise man indeed!

As I walked back to the motel, I passed the Ukrainian Cultural Institute, which had been closed when I cycled by earlier.  The sign said they opened at 9, and I thought I’d check it out before cycling on tomorrow.  I peered in the windows, and could see a lot of books, pictures and handicrafts, so I was excited to hear more about the history of my father’s people in this part of North Dakota.

Back at the hotel, I phoned into a Shanti conference call, with Skype performing quite poorly here in Dickinson, which was surprising.  But it wasn’t as bad as my ATT phone which only connected sporadically and dropped every time I made a call.  I guess the telecom infrastructure here is overloaded too.  I also did some bills and a little work, before getting ready for bed.  Since I’d been waking up hungry and with stomach cramps in the middle of the night, I ate the chicken breast and a banana before going to bed.

Day 50----Barely able to get going today, Circle MT to Beach ND

90.8 miles, 7:06, 12.8 mph

I slept very fitfully last night, waking up at least three or four times, and looking at the clock.  I was also very hungry, and ate a banana around 4 am.  In these parts of the eastern end of the Mountain Time Zone it starts to get light around 5, even this late in the summer, and as it got light, I had a hard time sleeping.

I felt hungry but nauseous, and finally got out of bed around 6:00.  I tried to eat the white cake with peach sauce, but it just made my stomach feel sicker.  I sadly tossed it, and tried to eat a bit of the homemade cinnamon roll I bought at the nice little café yesterday afternoon.  Sadly, it was bland, too sweet, and I couldn’t eat much of it either.  I really felt like I was starting to lose it, stuck in a seedy, run down motel, in the middle of nowhere Montana.  I was tired, and hadn’t really recovered from yesterday’s hilly ride.

I had a long conversation with myself about going on, that Glendive was only  50 miles of easy riding away, and it was on I-94, which was a possible escape route, at least with a bus.  The forecast was also for a tailwind today, so I threw that into my bargaining with myself about riding today.  Finally I left around 7:50, after essentially being awake since 4 AM.  It was a slow start, and lot of climbing to get out of Circle.  Then the road rolled for a bit, before finally going over a summit.  The road rejoined the rail spur shortly after the summit, and my speed picked up, along with the tailwind.  I rode quickly, and skipped the closed up town of Lindsay, and cruised along, feeling pretty good, but also tired.  The railroad spur to Circle was right next to the road, and for at least 5 or 6 miles, was solidly packed with empty grain cars, awaiting the harvest.

 Over the past couple of days, I’ve been fussing with my right cleat, which lost a screw in Glacier, and I haven’t been able to get it quite right.  As a result, I’ve had some IT band tightness and pain in my right leg, but mostly when I’m walking or sometimes sleeping at night.  I’ve been doing lots of stretches, massage etc, but it’s still bothering me, and today it’s bothering me a little on the bike too.

This felt like returning to civilization

 

I got to Glendive around 1230, after only 3 hours and 45 minutes on the bike, and had a nice picnic lunch in the park with the swimming pool.  Glendive has seen some prosperity also from the oil boom, and the downtown, which centers on the railroad station, had some life in it too.  Sadly the little public park by the historic depot had no public bathrooms, so I found the pool park, which was much shadier.

It was still pretty early, and I had a discussion with myself about going on today.  I still had a great westerly, only the third one in the last ten days, and there were two towns along the route, one Wibaux, about 30 miles away, and the other, Beach, the first town in North Dakota, 40 miles away.  Both had motels and grocery stores, and I called each of the motels and they had plenty of rooms (I was finding that the oil boom wasn’t having as much of an impact this summer as previous years, due to lots of new rooms being built closer to the drilling action).  The road was a bit up and down across the prairie, but the grades on the freeway (no old US 10 to bicycle here) were smooth, if a bit long.  So I decided to be done with Montana once and for all, and get to at least Wibaux, on the border, and to Beach if I felt ok when I got to Wibaux.

More prairie

Usually after about the 4^th hour of riding, my endorphins kick in, and push my body along when it’s tired.  And today was no exception.  It took me a little more than two hours of gently rolling riding to get to Wibaux, which turned out to be a charming historic little town.  Lots of little shops for this part of the world, a couple nice new renovations with more going on, and a sparkling clean and tidy small supermarket, where the owner was also the butcher.  I had a nice chat with the cashier, a local young woman, in her early 20s, from Beach, and she told me about how the oil boom has made it possible for young folks like her and her boyfriend to have jobs and stay near home.  She, her boyfriend, and their young child live with her mom, and are able to have a pretty good middle class life at a young age.  Quite a contrast to earlier generations in these parts which had to leave in order to make their way in the world.

After some juice and a snack, I headed out to check out the town.  It had a nice little park where you could camp, but it was right next to the busy Great Northern Railroad line, which from here was the historic Portland-St. Paul line, and lots of thriving little businesses, including a brew pub!  If only the lodging were in town, rather than in a faceless tacky suburban building out by the freeway.

Lovely little Wibaux

 

I headed out of town on the old US 10, which takes you to the Montana Visitor Center, and an exhibit of the history of the area.  Interestingly, Wibaux was named for a Frenchman who came to start a big cattle business in Montana in the 1880s, and the town and the county were named after him.  The woman at the visitor center had been the town postmaster, and was full of information and local history.  Wibaux was a nice town, the first nice little town in a long, long while.

I’ve been feeling some pressure the last few days to get to an airport, so I can fly back for the Shanti board retreat, and the pressure, along with the endorphin high, kicked in, and sent me on my way to the North Dakota border.  And to be honest, I was ready to be done with the 896 miles I’d pedaled across Montana.

 

50 minutes later, a mile into North Dakota, I pulled off the freeway to see the typical ugly freeway interchange gas stations and motel.  Disappointed again by the locale, and the lack of anything local, it was a bit discouraging.  I had noticed there was another motel in town, about half a mile away, but it was the same price and didn’t include breakfast.  In any event  I had made a reservation at the Buckboard Inn (nothing quaint other than the name)  and I reckoned I was on the hook.

Lovely little Beach ND

Happily the clerk was the retired manager of the place, a delightful friendly woman, who asked if I knew the other cyclist who had just checked in.  Ah, I thought, another solitary traveler!  As I was getting ready to wheel my bike to the door by my room, another cyclist pulled up!  A whole cycling convention was shaping up, and I was hoping that I had would have a dinner companion.  Dewayne, who had just arrived, on his way from the Twin Cities to Kalispell, was interested, and we invited the other cyclist, Scott, to come with us.  Scott was tired and didn’t want to bike into town, so after cleaning up Dewayne and I headed into town to the Mexican restaurant, La Playa.  Clever name for a restaurant in Beach ND, so maybe things were looking up.

Turns out the food was pretty good.  The restaurant is owned by a couple, she from Utah, and he from Mexico, and our waiter was their going-into-10^th- grade son, who had just returned from an international music camp in Bottineau, ND. It was his first time away from home by himself, and he was clearly eager for more of the world outside Beach.  His family had moved from Las Vegas, before the oil boom, and were Mormons too, and regularly go to the nearest church in Glendive---only in America!  Another surprising example of how the Mormon population seems to be increasing here on the northern plains.

It was really nice to have an intelligent, engaging conversation, and later I realized that it had been a long time, since I was back in Dodson, that I’d had any kind of conversation over a meal.  We lingered for a long while, and I heard about Dewayne’s first ride, from the Twin Cities to Aspen, in 1980, when he was only 17, and some of his subsequent rides.  He was on a short trip now to see friends in Kalispell, and I really envied him the shortness, and the forecast for winds in his direction, not mine, over the next few days.  We lingered at the table, talking, before we both realized it was getting late (for cyclists up early) and he had had a tough day of headwinds.  We cycled back to the motel, and I fell asleep before 930.

Day 49---morning meltdown, Wolf Point to Circle MT

54.9 miles, 5:13, 10.5 mph

The rain woke me up at 4 am, as the gutters on the hotel leaked and the rain poured over the edge of the roof, making a lot of noise outside the door to my room.  Today's stretch of highway to Circle is hilly, and very desolate, so rain is a bad omen.  I had a hard time getting back to sleep as the rain continued, even with earplugs.  Over the last three or four days, I've been pretty anxious in the mornings, and my two weather days in Glasgow weren't at all restful.  I've been sleeping poorly, and feeling pretty blah in the mornings.  I think some of it is endorphin withdrawal, maybe my endorphin levels are plunging during the night?

I dozed fitfully, and around 7 went to the breakfast room to eat.  My stomach was tight and I was a little nauseous, but manage to get some toast and peanut butter down.  It was still raining hard, so Iwent back to my room, and checked the radar.  It looked like the last line of thunderstorms would be through Wolf Point soon, so I started pack.

While packing I felt awful, and really didn't want to go on with my trip.  I spent 30 minutes or so checking escape routes, via train, rental car, and plane.  The long, hard days alone on the road are really starting to affect my mental attitude, and for a while I just lay in bed trying to meditate and calm myself down.  I've never felt this way on a bicycle tour before, and it's a new situation for me to handle.

Wolf Point has seen better days, Hart Schaffner and Marx no more

The depressed downtown

A possible escape?

Finally I could hear that the rain had stopped, and I decided I could push on to Circle today, and it turned out to be a really rough day of cycling. The first few miles along the Missouri River valley were pleasant, then after crossing the river at an historic bridge,I finally managed to eat some food.

The endless up and down hills went on for 20 miles, and I took it slowly, still feeling pretty burned out, until I reached the only town along the way.  At the little closed up town of Vida I sat and ate my lunch on the bench in front of the post office, which was closed, like the bar and grill and everything else except the  Cenex gas and garage.  Once again the guys at the local Cenex came through with water, but they gave me a bit of a hard time about being a cyclist.   Kind of that country macho thing that I've gotten a few times before.  A local medical delivery guy who stopped by the Cenex told me that there were two cyclists headed north, and to watch out for them.

Abandoned school

An abandoned church

Endless prairie

 

About ten miles out of town, over more hills, I ran into the two cyclists, MJ and Kory, two recent college grads who were riding to promote sustainability.  Their blog, Spokes of Green, is here http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=1&doc_id=12434&v=1a.  We chatted a bit about the rigors of the road and what was coming up on both our routes.  It was nice to chat, but after they left, I sure felt lonely.  Since Ben has gone back to Berkeley, it's been really lonely day after day, and there aren't many people in the towns I visit to make connections with.

The hills went on and on, and I finally got to Circle, which is another declining Montana prairie town, but with a little more life than most of the others I've seen.  It's clearly getting a little bit of spillover work and money from the oil boom, which is about 50 miles to the east.  The motel was at the edge of town, and boy did it look sad and decrepit.  Rather than check in right away, I rode into town to take a look around, and examine the food options.  I picked up some snacks and breakfast food at the local supermarket, which had the usual collection of processed foods, but I scored a 'white cake with peach sauce' that looked pretty good. 

 

 

Circle MT outskirts

One of 6 or 7 meth billboards I saw today

I looked around town at the dining options and spied a new looking place, and thought I'd go there for dinner.  I went back to the motel and sadly the motel has not made any new investment, despite having more business from the oil boom.  While it was clean, it had old musty carpet, and old fixtures.  My friend Lani messaged me that she had stayed there, and thankfully I didn't get her room with the inch of light under the door!

I went to the new fancy place in town for dinner, but when I got there, I found mostly the same old Montana meat and fried food menu, but I did have a 'Cobb' sandwich, which was a grilled chicken breast with bacon and avocado.  It was tasty, but I'm really quite sick of eating french fries.  It's off to bed early tonight, as I'm hoping that I can muster the energy to have a longer day, and finally get out of Montana.