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.