9:2

I wonder when men stopped taking their hats off indoors?  It seems that every table in every restaurant we’ve eaten in has at least one man with a baseball cap on.  Why is that?  So it was refreshing, at the Medora Musical last night, when all the men took off their hats as we all stood to the song:  I’m Proud to be an American.  Charles will have written more in his posting, but it was a fun evening.

The flags were whipping at the Medora Musical!  We were worried that our tent would be gone by the time we got back to the campground, given the high winds, but it hadn’t budged in our absence

And again we’ve had some great people experiences.  As we were walking the couple of miles uphill to the Medora Musical, a couple in a car offered us a ride up.  They also said they would drive us back down afterwards if we didn’t want to walk.  And as we were waiting for the parking lot to clear out after the Musical, they asked if we wanted to spend the night at their house in Dickinson where we planned to be the following night. How nice was that?  Unfortunately, Charles had already paid for a motel room, so we had to decline.  But we really appreciated their offer of hospitality.  How often would any of that happen in Phoenix, Washington, Brussels or wherever you live?  Or, when was the last time you asked a stranger into your home?  Then yesterday, on our ride into town, we stopped by a truck selling cherries from Washington State.  The owner, who said he had also done some distance biking (in Uganda and Japan of all places), said that cherries for cyclists were free and we walked away, or rather cycled away, with a pound of incredibly delicious cherries.  There isn’t a day that goes by without some unexpected kindness from a total stranger.

One of the things that we end up paying attention to as we’re biking along is street names.  The other day we passed a street called Do Drop In.  Really!  Today, in the middle of nowhere North Dakota we passed the below street:

The intersection of 36th St and 134th Avenue!

I guess my East coast sensibilities still have me thinking of Avenues as something grand, not country dirt roads.  A couple of “blocks” later we saw 132 1/2 R Avenue.  Funny.

One of the things I love about this trip is that we get to see, close up, states we’ve never even been in before and, in the case of North Dakota, states we haven’t ever known anyone from.  Now we’ve seen thousands of North Dakotans and met a lot.  My expectations were for a state that was boring, flat, non-descript.  It has been anything but.  Very beautiful countryside and incredibly varied, from fields of rye and clover, to the gorgeous, albeit somewhat desolate, Painted Canyon, to the Bad Lands and rolling hills.  And while the population is pretty monochromatic, we had a really good Mexican dinner last night, right next to our motel.  It rivals Mexican dinners we’ve had in Arizona.  We also saw our first oil well of the trip here.

Our first oil well on the outskirts of Dickinson, ND

Later on we saw one in Dickinson in the middle of a residential area…

Today is my birthday.  We’re celebrating with a leisurely moving, a day full of errands and a short ride to our final destination of Richardton where our warm showers host will be waiting for us.

The Medora Musical stage in the middle of the Badlands.

Song and dance at the Medora Musical.  What an amazing setting!