Empire Builder

We finally got out of Balta, off of the road to adventure, back onto the road of biking and ‘sanity’. The ride out to Rugby was so beautiful, it was like having Halloween in the summer! There were ribbons and pillows of really thick fog corner of houses and spilling out of the fields, between telephone poles and onto the road. We got to enjoy this surreal landscape all the way to the geographical center of North America (Rugby, but Tom claims Balta is closer to the actual point). We didn’t stopthat were just hanging on the much for the rest of the day. We took a short lunch break in Granville and hung out with a funny little ground squirrel and cool old farm equipment. In fine form, we rolled into Minot at around 2:30.








Unfortunately Minot is a quite unattractive town that was goodfor a shower and library time, but not much else. If we'd hung around for the North Dakota State Fair that was starting the next day, I guess we may have changed our minds, but somehow I doubt it.




The next day we had another speedy ride. We did the 73 miles to
Newtown by 1:30. I guess this section of riding was through the ND version of the badlands. The constant up and down, eroded canyons and deserty dryness were a nice change of scenery. On this stretch I also inhaled a fly. I coughed for twenty minutes to get that jerk out of my wind pipe. I highly recommend keeping your mouth closed while you ride!
After a lunch break we went to hang out at the local Newtown pool were we killed time until the library opened. Outside the library this lanky guy with a news capy on approached us and told us he was in charge of the pool and that since there was a storm blowing in we were welcome to camp out in there. =) Sweet. That’s exactly what we did. He also brought us burgers! How awesome is Jim?!
The next morning the sky still looked dark and stormy, and there were distant rumbles of thunder, but as soon as we got on the road, the sun streaming through holes in the clouds, the weather took a turn for the better and we had a spectacular ride (with a tailwind, finally!!) with some intense downhills (and uphills too!) all the way to Williston. There were some crazy bug issues on this road though. If you so much as slowed to under 12mph, and don’t even think about stopping, the mosquitoes would swarm (and I mean SWARM – not an exaggeration) all around you. I made that mistake to get this picture to all of you – hope it’s not too blurry:



That was another 73 mile day done by 12:30 – Hot Damn!! We are getting speedy =)


Williston was another unremarkable town made memorable by the wonderful company we were keeping =) On the ride into town we met Sophia and Yoni who let us know where they were camping in town and we met them there later in the day. Sophia and her husband, Bruce, are traveling with third friend (who we did not get to meet) and they all take turns driving the sag vehicle, full of all the wonderful things you wish you could take with you on your bike. Yoni is riding with Mike, whose recumbant bike was experiencing some serious difficulties. Thank goodness that Williston happens to be the welding capital of the US, because he found someone who did a very creative fix-it job on his derailleur hanger. All of us braved the mosquitoes together in the city park and had a wonderful time, eating, going to see Batman, and just talkin’ talkin talkin’. They were all going East to West too, which is the first time we’ve met other people going the ‘wrong’ way, like us. We really enjoyed having a bike gang and are sad that we had to rush off to Missoula. Such is life – hopefully we can catch up sometime on the west side!

And when I say ‘rush off”, I mean that we were seriously in a bind, because the Biomimicry collaboration with the Missoula Coyote Choir and Ani Difranco had resulted in an event happening on July 24th, which we could not have made on our bikes ( no matter how speedy we have become). So we decided that we wanted to jump on this wonderful opportunity to hang out with all these great people in Missoula this week and after an unsuccessful attempt at hitchhiking on HWY 2 we took the Empire Builder train line from Williston to Whitefish, Montana, and then biked down to Missoula from there. Amtrak made us box our bikes, which was distressing, but once on the train everything went smoothly and we at least got to see the whole stretch that we would have been biking. 7 days of biking flying by in 10 hours, that was interesting and kind of a trip – but I have to say that most of eastern Montana is a very flat, dry, and hot expanse of land. And then, after seeing them off in the distance for ages, you are suddenly in the mountains. Everything changes in a moment. The smell of the air, the vegetation, and in a moment we felt like we were close to home =)
When we finally got to Whitefish it was getting dark already and we rushed to get our bikes all back together and try to make it out to the state park to camp. Mmm, and then we got discouraged by riding in the dark on a narrow road and just pitched our tent behind some commercial building on a suspiciously lush patch of grass. I even went so far as to look for the sprinkler heads, but to no avail. The next morning brought a very localized upside-down rain storm. We wheeled ourselves over, out of the range of the sprinklers domain, and got ready for our journey down to Missoula.
Love,
Maya