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.
What can I say, into every journey a little rain, thunder and mud must fall !
ReplyDeleteActually you have been lucky so far. Jim and I laughed all the time reading your blog,hope you can laugh now too. You are right what a day !!