52 miles. No flat tires!!

We stayed with a Warm Showers host, Joel, who provided shower, bed and a good meal plus he’s an avid baseball fan. I even forgave him his allegiance to the Cubs!

We got on the road early and purchased breakfast at a grocery store as well as a sandwich for lunch later.  The first part of the ride was on a county road, newly paved with almost no traffic… Very nice riding. We rolled through Hebron, a.k.a. “Brick City,” and had a nice long break in the city park of Glen Ullin but shortly after that were forced back on to I-94.

Today’s experience was very much more stressful than our other rides on the interstate. Part of if was the road surface, concrete roadway vs. new asphalt, so the tire noise from cars and trucks was much louder and more sibilant. Another part was that the shoulder had almost full width rumble strips so every 20 feet or so we had a 12-18″ strip we had to navigate. But the biggest difference was the huge volume of truck traffic all whizzing by at 75 mph! So we had a not very relaxing 11 mile stretch on the highway before we exited back onto another small two lane road. Whew!

We biked to New Salem to stay for the night. New Salem is Home to Salem Sue, the world’s largest Holstein cow sculpture – 38 feet high and 50 feet long. It rivals the world’s largest Bison and the world’s largest catfish sculptures in nearby North Dakota towns.

Tomorrow we are on to Bismarck.