ND

North Dakota

Day 32 – Gackle to Enderlin

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74 miles. Just short of 6 hours in the saddle.

We averaged almost 12.5 mph today. There was little to no wind and, being in the middle of the 4 day weekend, almost no traffic plus the road was more or less flat. So all in all not a bad day on two wheels.

We left the Honey Hub a little after 7 AM and a breakfast of a peanut butter sandwich since the only place in Gackle to eat didn’t open til later. It was an uneventful ride, which is a good thing.

We did meet some cyclists heading West who warned us that the only restaurant in Enderlin was closed for the holiday and advised us to stop at a town about 25 miles before our destination and buy some pizza or fast food from the gas station there. That was not an appealing plan! Later on we met another cyclist heading west who said that there was a gas station just as you enter Enderlin and we could get 7/11 type food there. Not optimal for dinner but at least we wouldn’t be carrying cold pizza in our panniers for 4 hours!  So we made it to the little hotel in town and there we were told that yes indeed the cafe was closed for the holiday but there were two other restaurants in town that were open. That’s the problem with eye witness accounts!

The much touted salad bar at one restaurant was not even stocked on this day and the Thai restaurant wasn’t serving Thai food, just burgers etc. We settled for more fried chicken and watched the beginning of the Coke 400 from Daytona. Last week Enderlin celebrated it’s 150 anniversary and the bartender said that when that was over everyone headed “to the lake.” That’s why the restaurants were not fully open and the streets empty. Walking through town reminded me of the scene from “The Mouse that Roared” when the army of Grand Fenwick invades an empty Manhattan.

Once in our room and showered, Maja spent the next hour and a half on my phone with Apple support trying to get her phone to function. Arggh. Looks like the problem is partially solved so at least her phone isn’t a brick. Unfortunately, the fix from Apple resulted in erasing all her photos from today!

Tomorrow we’re off to Fargo and into Minnesota.

Day 31 – Napoleon to Gackle

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38 miles. Short, quiet day.

Our trek to Gackle and our Warm Showers stay at the Honey Hub (more on the name later) was on a more or less empty road. It’s the same route that drove us nuts yesterday with the screaming trucks blast in sand and rocks in our faces but today there was hardly any traffic at all! Start of a 4 day weekend maybe? The wind was from the South today (that is, from our right instead of our left as yesterday) and that effectively cancelled any blowing sand or huge bursts of wind from what little traffic there was.  There was still no shoulder but riding on the roadway was OK.

Our road today. Note the 65 MPH limit and the lack of shoulder. The small space between the white line and the grass is all rumble strip!

We passed through rolling hills just like the last several days and past an increasing number of lakes.  Minnesota might be the land of 10,000 lakes but Eastern North Dakota has 9,999. Some of the lakes even had resident Pelicans!

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Maja at one of the many fairly large lakes we passed. Sorry, I couldn’t get any Pelicans to pose with her.

We’re staying tonight in the basement of the house of the owner of Miller Honey. They’re one of the largest honey producers in the country and the makers of Honey Stinger Energy Chews. Every summer they truck their 12000 or so hives from Northern California to Gackle, ND, then back to CA for the winter and Spring. That is the origin of their bike retreat, Honey Hub.

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Home of many curious cows!

Day 30 – Bismarck to Napoleon

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75 miles.  One month on the road and Maja’s official retirement date!

There are a lot things to talk about on this momentous day! But first the day’s events.

We had breakfast with Ron and Joyce and took Ron’s advice about a better route out of town instead of following the ACA maps that are our guides.  He was right and it saved us some time and a bit of climbing. Unfortunately the wind was against us and the dark clouds were sweeping in so the first 25 miles or so were a hard slog, no rain but cycling against the wind is never a lot of fun. After these initial miles we turned right and, mirabile dictu, we had a fairly pleasant tail wind for 24 miles!

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The overpass in Sterling where we turned to get the wind more or less at our backs

At the town of Hazelton we turned to the east once more and reacquainted ourselves with the head wind for the final 26 mile run! In addition, this road had a lot of truck traffic, no shoulders and very rough expansion joints. The trucks hauling gravel and sand screamed toward us at 65 mph and, apparently, trailer covers are not required here so as they passed, we were peppered with what amounted to a sandblaster spray! Ouch!

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Rolling hills, no shoulder and expansion joints as far as the eye can see!

We rolled into Napoleon and stopped to talk to a guy who was fishing in one of the lakes. He described catching three northern pike that were at least 4 feet long! Good eating but a little bony – he soaks the fish in Sprite or 7 UP before cooking it just to soften the bones!

We’re staying in a tiny  but very neat little cabin and walked to the only restaurant in town, a diner, for burgers and malts and a local favorite, fleishkueckle – a German/Russian meat pie.

The American flags are up on Main Street here as we come up to July 4.

I’ll gather my thoughts over the next few days to condense a month’s worth of what we’ve learned so far. But the first observation is that most people are very kind and helpful and that is a good thing to know.

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The lakes in Napoleon have risen so much that they have swallowed roads and some houses … But the Pike fishing is good!

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This photo doesn’t do the field justice.  As we approached it, both of us thought it was a very full lake but once next to it saw it to be a blue flowered crop.

Day 29 – New Salem to Bismarck

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UPDATED

35 miles.

We got to Bismarck after going through our first rain of the entire trip! I got a hair cut!

our Warm Showers hosts, Ron and Joyce have been amazing and have kept us busy. Great meal and a tour of Bismarck including Fort Abraham Lincoln.

no wi fi so this will be short. Photos later.

on to Napoleon tomorrow.

We knew today would be short so slept in a bit  – we crossed into Central Daylight Time Zone (check out on a map where the dividing lines are between Mountain and Central zones and you’ll see they’re a bit crazy in North Dakota) and even though we reset our watches there was a glitch so the sleep-in was inadvertent. A little way outside of town we saw some nasty, dark clouds building up and could see the rain coming down to our left. We tried to outrun it but failed so had to stop and don our rain gear. The shower only lasted about 45 minutes and wasn’t  particularly heavy but we did get our shoes and heads wet. Then the sun came out for the rest of the day.

Ron and Joyce, our Warm Showers hosts, recommended that we stop at the North Dakota Heritage Center next to the State House. It is a great museum showcasing North Dakota history, dinosaur skeletons, a Native American wing and others. We learned, for instance that since the 2010 census, North Dakota is the fastest growing population state in the country. This is due in part to the workers associated with the Bakken Oil fields and that work has more or less stopped once the oil market collapsed. We also watched a fascinating video about chipping flint to make arrowheads.

Coming out of the center we were greeted by another line of dark clouds so beat a hasty path to Ron and Joyce’s house. They welcomed us in after taking our pictures for their album and fed us then drove us out to Fort Abraham Lincoln. This was the fort where Custer was stationed and from which he departed on his way to Little Big Horn. The fort sits high above the Missouri River and commands 360 degree views of the surrounding hills.  It is a little hard to imagine infantry and cavalry living there so far from the river and the city of Bismarck.

Ron also drove us to what is known in Bismarck as the Frank Lloyd Wright house. It certainly bears a Wrightian look from the prow to the fascia and the brick coursing but my web search of Wright houses says there are no buildings associated with Wright in North Dakota.  If anyone at Taliesin has an idea of the provenance of this house, let me know. You can tap on any of the photos to enlarge them to get a better view.

Tomorrow is a long day to Napoleon.

 

Day 28 – Richardton to New Salem

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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.

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Break time and email check. (Also the latest Trump and Brexit stories)

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!

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This corn definitely qualifies as “knee high by the Fourth of July.”

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.

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Tomorrow we are on to Bismarck.

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The German Evangelical Lutheran church in historic Old Salem.

Day 27 -Dickinson to Richardton

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29 miles.  Maja’s Birthday!!!!

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We had planned on a short day today since we had a package to pick up from REI, stuff to mail back and a quick visit to the local bike shop to see if the mechanic could fix a problem Maja is having with her rear shifter. Well … the REI package arrived a week ago or so and the post office has a 4 day hold policy so it was sent back!! We did manage to get the tent etc. sent back to PHX via UPS so cross that off the list. We got to the bike shop early hoping that someone could look at the shifting and Jason, the mechanic, spent 45 minutes or so straightening a problem with the cable and shifter then noticed that Maja’s chain had an issue so did some repairs to that, too. She took the bike out for a test drive and Jason tweaked things then announced that he wasn’t going to charge us anything! “It’s how we treat travelers,” he said!  Kindness of strangers department yet again.

Returning to our hotel to pack up, I found that my brand new rear tire was flat!  Over 3 weeks on the road without any tire problems and now 4 flats or so in the last 3 days. I pumped the tire up enough to limp back to Jason and he installed a new one that we paid for this time!

Our ride was uneventful and very short. We have been sitting in the local grocery store for an hour (they have wi fi) waiting for our Warm Showers host to get home.  We are bringing some food and a birthday dessert tonight to the raucous celebration!

Tomorrow we’re back on the road for real and hope to be in Fargo (oh jeez!) for the 4th.

 

Musings (6)

/ Maja Wessels / 1 Comment

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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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The Medora Musical stage in the middle of the Badlands.

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

 

Day 26 – Medora to Dickinson

/ wescov / 1 Comment

40 miles.  Not bad for a rest day!

First, I’ll remind you to take another look at yesterday’s revised posting. Now that we’re in the sphere of reasonably good wi fi I have updated that day with photos etc.

Now to today. Late yesterday, after looking at the predicted winds, we decided to forego our rest day and take advantage of the westerly breezes to help us at least part way on our trek.  We have some things being shipped to us in Dickinson at the PO so we went ahead and packed up to ride. The first rude awakening was that we had two flat tires … one each.  I replaced Maja’s then started on mine. In the process of searching for the offending needle like piece of metal in my tire, I was shocked to find that the tread on my rear tire was worn almost all the way through revealing the bias ply just covering the tube!

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Early morning bike repair

Very fortunately, Medora has an “awesome” bike shop and, hallelujah, they were open on Sunday morning! Just over 100$ later I had two new tires and two new tubes.  The woman at the shop, Jennifer – who, it turns out, spends winters in the Phoenix area – said that the Continental tires that came with our bikes are not long lasting, something about the rubber compound being soft.

Needless to say, I would have been very nervous about riding on the nearly worn through tire so it was a huge relief to have found a solution before we even got on the road!

Jennifer also recommended a less traveled route that allowed us to get off of I-94 and enjoy a relatively quiet, wind aided ride into Dickinson.  Tomorrow we will pick up the items mailed to us and – big decision – ship back to Phoenix our camping gear. We have found the night’s sleep we get camping not as restorative as staying in motels or with our Warm Showers hosts so we are unburdening our load a little. Another thought is that as we proceed eastward and deeper into the summer, the days and nights will be increasingly hot making air conditioned motels all the more attractive.

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Our last tenting site

We pulled off the road to an overlook featuring a scenic vista of The Painted Canyon.

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The Painted Canyon in The Badlands. I learned that the term refers to a geological formation and not just to this area of North Dakota. The word is a translation of Mauvaises Terres so named because the soil is dry, crumbly and doesn’t hold together.

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Our bikes at the overlook. While at the bike shop, a passerby noticed the Wright Foundation logo and said to the owner of the bike shop, “Ask that guy if the inventor of Lincoln Logs wasn’t Frank Lloyd Wright’s son.” A cigar to that gentleman!

 

Day 25 – Glendive to Medora, ND

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61 miles. Finally out of Montana.

We expected wind today in our favor so timed our departure to take advantage of it. Today our route had us riding on Interstate 94 and with the wind advantage we expected to make great time. At first the boost from the breeze was a little disappointing given that the forecast was for stronger wind but we still appreciated the all day help.

At first blush cycling on the Interstate sounds terrifying but the reality is that the shoulder is very wide and the road surface fairly smooth. It was a lot less scary than some of the seller roads we have been on over the past three weeks if only because the cars and trucks weren’t so close.

 

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Finally out of Montana

not good wi fi coverage so I’ll add photos tomorrow

one last thing. we’ll give details tomorrow, we want to the Medora Musical. Great experience and thanks to Jay and Carrie for the ride and conversation.

OK. I’m back with the promised details and photos. We are in Dickinson on day 26 and have fairly good broadband so I’ll update.

Medora is home to the Medora Musical, a 90 minute stage show put on every night of the summer in a beautiful amphitheater with the backdrop being the Badlands. The show has been described as “A high school musical for adults” and is a sometimes corny but still professional evening of song, dance, country music, patriotism and a little bit of history – namely the influence that this area of the Badlands had on Teddy Roosevelt.

Before the show, the tradition is a Steak Fondue Dinner and on this evening they served 1000 people! The steaks are put on the tines of pitchforks and dunked into boiling soy oil for a short time then allowed to rest then served.

imageSome of the 1000 12 oz steaks ready for the fondue

The strong wind that helped us get to Medora so fast this morning continued right up to showtime but the amphitheater shields the stage so on with the show! The opening featured horses and riders and the singing of the national anthem.  The MC had been a  child actor in the Musical years ago and now was in the spotlight.

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Medora Musical on stage

Among the acts such as a tribute to our National Parks, a country gospel segment, and a rodeo tribute was the featured performer, Todd Oliver and his dog Irving, a ventriloquist with an amazing way of making the dog open his mouth as though he were talking! This guy had been on America’s Got Talent and the Tonight Show and was really exceptionally good. The funniest bit was two volunteers from the audience on stage with Todd. It’s difficult to describe the schtick but he asked the volunteers to open their mouths whenever he squeezed the back of their necks. With their mouths open, he put sounds  and words in their mouths with his ventriloquist’s skill. As I said, it is difficult to accurately describe the routine. You can search Todd Oliver on YouTube and get a flavor of his bit.

The end of the show was a reenactment of The Rough Riders charge up San Juan Hill and after that a rousing rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”and the evening was truly over.