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.