50 miles. Very pleasant riding … With one exception.

“Somedays are diamonds and some days are stones” J. Denver. Yesterday definitely was a big old, mud encrusted, worthless piece of rock and today, while not a perfect gemstone was fun biking on a cloudless day on a reasonable road. What more can one ask for?

We leave the acres of farmland and begin into a different landscape.  The sky was a much paler blue today.

We awoke and got on the road by 7, taking a state highway south east to Glendive and the Yellowstone River. It was so nice to be running the ridge of this hill system instead of crossing numerous ridges against the wind, as we did yesterday.  Early on we met two cyclists heading from Portland, OR, to Chicago and they, too, attested to yesterday being (in his words), “The worst day of cycling I have ever had!” We were corroborated! Yesterday really was horrible … It wasn’t just us.

We cycled on nearly empty roads for many miles, the wind, what little there was, from our left. We ran through a new landscape, the precursor to the Badlands we will see in North Dakota.  There were many old trestle bridges but the rail line here is weed covered and ostensibly abandoned.

Our first glimpse of the Badlands

Biking either downhill, level or slightly uphill we made very good time and were congratulating ourselves at our projected early arrival in Glendive. That was the time when Maja found she had a leak in her rear tire. There was no shoulder to retreat to so we moved as far off the road as we could and replaced the tire. That process involves unloading the bike, taking off the rear wheel, removing the old tire, finding the cause of the leak (in this case two small staple size pieces of metal probably from one of the many shattered truck retreads along side the road), installing a new tube then replacing everything.  The repair was a success and we cruised (or limped) into Glendive.

Tomorrow we head into North Dakota and we are allowed to ride on Interstate 94 since the smaller parallel roads are, for the most, dirt except for stretches of Old Highway 10.

The view of my “office”

And the road ahead. The divots next to the white line are the ubiquitous rumble strips that will definitely jar some fillings loose if you wander onto them. Our path is the shoulder between the rumble strip and the grass – for the most part.