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 4th 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-10th-
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.
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