I am alive....

FYI I'm fine and at Rock Creek Marina near Fort Peck tonight and tomorrow night. There is spotty voice service here and no data (I'm using employee's hot spot now which won't be reliably available) so I may be more or less out of touch and unreachable for the next 48 hours or so. I'm definitely in the outback now!

posted from Bloggeroid

The people post

I've been meeting more and more interesting people every day it seems, so here's a post about today as an example of the types of people I encounter pretty much every day.

I already mentioned in my last post the lovely warmshowers.org hosts of yesterday evening, so of course I had a final opportunity to chat with Joy before setting off.

I backtracked a couple of miles to go to the grocery store. On the way to the grocery store I ran into Max and Stephanie from Germany whom I had met a couple of weeks ago way back in eastern North Dakota and we seemed to keep ending up in the same campgrounds. They were on their way today to Circle, MT, which was also my destination, so we arranged to rendezvous there.

I had coffee near the grocery store and a really nice talk about life in general with the coffee shop owner Tonja.



Still in the grocery store parking lot loading up the bike, I talked to another local who bicycled a lot who gave me good tips on my route etc.

About 10 miles down the road this guy Kenny pulls over and asks if I'm on my way to Circle (pretty much the only place I could be en route to on the particular road I was on). Kenny says I should come pitch my tent in his yard and that I should ask the group of cyclists I will meet coming my direction who camped there the night before and they will tell me how nice it is to camp at Kenny's. And sure enough I do see them and ask and they do confirm it was a good place to stay.

When I arrive in Circle, Max and Stephanie have already started setting up camp in the park so I decide to stay there with them rather than go to Kenny's.




Bonus, there is a swimming pool in the park so I got in a swim which was nice on a sunny 90 degree day.

On the way into town, I met four more long-distance bicyclists, two of whom are staying at Kenny's and two of whom are at the local motel tonight. We talked a while mainly about routes.

Once I got to town, I had beer and a chili and cornbread mall at the Round Towne bar. It was delicious, and the bartender had just been yesterday at the exact spot that I will be tomorrow so she was able to give me good information.

While I was in town, or rather in the pool I guess it was, a crazy man came to the campsite and ranted at Max and Stephanie about his taxes LOL (but we are keeping our bear sprays handy in case he comes back later!).

Today was an exceptionally social day and I usually don't meet quite that many people, but since I've usually been writing about the scenery or the weather or whatever, I wanted to give a flavor of the social life of a vagabond in at least one post.

posted from Bloggeroid

Updated itinerary page; now in Montana

The itinerary page had been updated to include my revised route to Billings, adding a detour to Fort Peck since I had some extra time. There is also another new map at the bottom of the itinerary page which shows where I'm going after Billings until central Wyoming at least, which is as far as my detailed plans go.

The past couple of days I've ridden some miles on the interstate, which is what is done out here because sometimes there is literally no other road that goes where you want to go. As scary as it sounds, it really feels reasonably safesafer than plenty of roads over ridden on in Chicago!wide shoulders and not too much traffic. It's just a really nice 4-lane divided highway.

Last night I stayed in a sketchy-looking campground, but the owner was really nice and there was a nice shower and even laundry there. It turned out to be a comfortable place. Tonight I'm staying indoors with a very nice couple who are warmshowers.org hosts. They're also hosting another guy who's going west to east so it was good to get some intel on what lies in store for me next.

The weather has been perfect and the landscape is about the same as the past few days, so, really enjoyable but nothing particularly new to show in photographs.

posted from Bloggeroid

What a difference a day makes!

Yesterday was the most difficult and unpleasant of the trip so far, but today was the most amazing.  First for today....

Today I rode from Dickenson, ND to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, ND, and it was magnificent.  Perfect weather, amazing landscapes, etc.  A few of the many pictures I took may give you an impression:

And then, at the end of the day, I found this campsite awaiting me, with friendly neighbors in the adjacent campsites to boot.

Now, for those of you who have a taste for Schadenfreude, I will describe my travails of yesterday--I'll put it in a timeline:

6:30am-11:30am: Waited out severe lightning and thunderstorms.  For about an hour of that, I actually huddled in the little concrete box which contained the pit toilet at the campsite in order to stay dry and non-electrocuted.

11:30am-11:45am: With the weather passed, I started riding.

11:45am-1:00pm: Remember the dirt road in the picture that I posted in my last blog entry--guess what happened to it after all that rain?  The North Dakota dirt makes such thick, sticky mud that it actually clogged and locked my wheels so that they would not roll *at all*.  I had to push my bicycle (along with the 65-70 pounds of gear on it), with non-rolling wheels, approximately a mile or a little more until I got to a gravel road.

1:00pm-2:00pm: Riding on the gravel road seems to be OK if slightly treacherous.  Among other hazards, my feet actually got glued into the clips on my pedals as the mud dried into a sort of cement--this almost made me crash when I tried to stop and put my foot down and couldn't get out of the clips!

2:00pm-3:00pm: Attempting to adjust/clean the front fender in order to stop the grinding sound as the tire rubbed against the caked cement-like mud inside it, I break the front fender.  Removing the front fender involves mostly dismantling the entire front rack and reassembling.

3:00-3:30pm: I finally hit a paved road and soon am at a Cenex gas station, which has a pizza parlor inside it.

3:30-4:00pm: Eat an entire large pizza except for two pieces which I save for later.

4:00pm: Realize that I have 55 miles to go until the campground where I had planned to stay.  Calculate that if I ride as fast as I can, I can reach it before dark.

4:05pm-8:30pm: Ride as fast and hard as I can through drizzling rain and periodically intense headwinds.  Have a scare as the rear tire starts to grind against the fender in the same way the front one had been doing (apparently as the mud dried it contracted onto the tire?)--thank heavens I was able to just push the mud out with my fingers this time without breaking the fender.

8:20pm: Oh, did I mention that the battery on my phone (which I was using to navigate to the campground) died just when I was getting to the tricky final part and as the light was starting to get iffy?

8:30-9:00pm: Arrive at campsite and quickly set up my tent as dusk falls.

9:00pm-??: Doze off then be woken up over and over again as people blow up their apparently endless remaining stores of fireworks.

??: wake up in the middle of a night with a tick crawling on my neck.