My Trip Across America

The trip is nearly entirely over for all of us now. Sam and Scott and Ryan left Wednesday afternoon and made it back in record time I believe. Eric and I connected with one of my friends from college and we have stayed at his house for the last two nights just outside of downtown Boston. We have played tourist and bum and it has been fantastic.

I have seen the ocean and the harbor, been to and camped on Cape Cod, played in the beach, seen Bunker Hill and the cemetery of Paul Revere, ate lunch at Harvard, eaten clam chowder, and seen what a night out in Boston looks like.

Eric and I have noticed how funny our legs feel after not exercising for 6 hours a day. In fact nearly everyday now my legs have started to cramp a little and they have almost increased in soreness. Thursday morning Eric and I were going to walk around the whole city seeing things and we started the morning by racing up the Bunker Hill Monument, it had about 300 stairs and we made it to the top pretty winded. On the way down Eric’s right quad really started to bother him, to the point where he was limping and could barely move it at all. That day I spent the day touring around the city myself while Eric sat at a coffee shop all day.

Looking back the trip has been amazing and wonderful and completely miserable all at the same time. We have seen some amazing things and met some incredibly generous and gracious people while at the same time being tired and wet a decent amount of the time. I have been superbly happy and feeling like I had hit rock bottom on this trip, sometimes in the same day. Looking back it has been a great experience, I’m glad I did it, and if you ask if I would do it again I would probably say yes…probably.

I wanted to thank everyone who helped us along the way.

The nice Southwest flight attendants, Gerald and Louis in Portland Oregon, Joan in Dayton Washington, Laura in Lewiston Washington, Jeff’s parents in a large section of Montana, Muriel in Big Sandy Montana, Cindy in Minot North Dakota, Janet and Monte in Harvey North Dakota, Will and Alese in nearly all of Minnesota, Eric and Jamie in Richland Center Wisconsin, Alan in Jefferson Wisconsin, Al in Mc Henry Illinois, Lance in Illinois and Indiana, awesome family in La Grange Indiana, Dick in Rochester New York, man in Flo’s Diner in Dunkirk New York, Steve in Pittsfield Massachusetts, Rich and Veronica in Milton Massachusetts, and James in Boston Massachusetts.

All these people made the trip significantly more enjoyable for all of us and we’re really thankful for all the help we got and I’m really sorry if I forgot someone.

Thanks for everyone who has been keeping up with our blogs and been praying for us, we have really seen God work in some pretty cool ways on this trip. I’m ready to get back home and see my family and friends and I’m glad I have a really cool story to tell.

So we finally made it to Boston! We weren’t planning on actually getting here until this afternoon but we had a change of plans. We were eating lunch yesterday around noon and realized that the place we were going to stay last night was about 15 miles off of our route, so we decided that we would rather just punch on through to the finish rather than continuing to take it easy. So from lunch we decided to go the rest of the 70 miles.

We had a great tail wind and the cloud cover had slightly picked up so it cooled off a little bit. We took route 9 into Boston and while the road conditions were great the traffic was pretty heavy and the drivers weren’t very good. Both Eric and I got right hooked, its when a driver turns right and cuts you off without realizing it. I was going 25 mph downhill and a younger looking lady and her friend pulled right in front of me. I slammed my breaks on and my front tire brushed the back of the car, I was pretty angry, and they probably didn’t even see me. That was the closest call I have had probably all trip, which I’m pretty thankful for.

We meandered through Boston for about an hour trying to get to a public access beach thing rather than just seeing the ocean from the harbor and as we’ve learned time and time again biking through cities is the worst experience ever. You have to stop a ton because of the lights, dodge traffic, people and pot holes, and you’re nearly guaranteed to get lost at least twice, and thats exactly what happened.

But eventually we made it to the beach, took pictures, took video, and high fived. After the celebration we found a TGI Friday’s really close to where we thought we were going to stay  the night. Ryan shuttled Sam and I to the restaurant and went back to get Scott and Eric. At the restaurant we quickly made friends with a few of the waitresses there who were pretty interested in what we just did. We ate a ton of food last night and then discovered that the place we though we were going to camp did not allow camping. I am for certain that I saw camping as one of the listed activities on the park’s website but everyone we talked to insisted it was not allowed.

We ended amazingly being able to stay the night with one of Eric’s dad’s coworkers (kinda, same company, different city) that lives in the Boston area. After dinner we shuttled to his house and it didn’t take much for me to fall asleep.

So we made it out of New York yesterday and straight into the hills we’ve been warned about ever since Chicago. We got a map from a really nice couple we stayed with in Rochester, NY, which is pretty close to where we started our trip in New York, of a bike route pretty much running from the east side of the state to the west side of the state. It was called bike route 5 and it guided us along rather nice roads with spectacular shoulders pretty much throughout our entire trip through NY, and it even took us through some pretty big cities too. The map had elevation maps that showed us where we got to climb big hills and where we got to go down them. At the very beginning of our trip we had maps with elevation maps and we learned they weren’t detailed enough to really show us when and where we would be climbing so we began to not trust the large spikes on these maps. And these maps were no different, where it showed a spike we experienced a slight increase in grade, so by the end of the state we completely ignored it. But the map showed a near 1500 foot climb to get out of the state, and that kind of scared me.

Indeed there was a huge climb to get out of the state. We got out of Albany and went up quite a bit, all in little spouts and nothing too serious, but then we rolled through about 10 miles of flat. We passed a huge race track in the middle of the rolling hills and there were tons of people and RV’s all around. We learned later that its one of the last independent race tracks in the country and people will come on a Saturday night with their Honda Civic’s and race other people in their Mazda’s. But 5 miles past the race track we began our climb up. It was a 3 mile climb with an average 7% grade, it was our biggest climb since day 8 of the trip when we climbed a pass in the rockies called Lolo’s Pass.

At the top we got into Massachusetts and we got to go downhill into the town of Pittsfield where we spent the night with a man named Steve. He was another brave soul from warmshowers.org who was adventurous enough to put up with 5 guys and their appetites. He grilled us hamburgers and let us do laundry and sleep in beds. He is a pretty serious bike rider and has toured the US following a route pretty similar to ours and has even toured Europe. He had a dog named Caesar who loved to bark at rocks and chase them across the floor, I had never seen this.

This morning Steve made us some fantastic pancakes with blueberries and legitimate maple syrup, the kind they get from the bottom of trees! He then rode out with us to show us how to get back on our route from his house and he ended up biking the first 20 miles of the ride with us, which included another 2 mile climb, but it wasn’t near as bad as the one yesterday.

We ate lunch in the town of Northampton, MA which has 4 colleges and the downtown area was filled with hipsters and bikers and hippies, so our panniers drew plenty of stares and questions.

Since we’re slightly ahead of schedule we’ve been enjoying shorter days and more relaxed afternoons. Today we only biked about 45 miles and we’ve been hanging out at a Barnes and Noble all afternoon which has been the longest time of doing nothing this entire trip, minus sleeping…

We will be in Boston Tuesday night, and now thats its close and I’m so excited to be done but I know I will miss the adventure at the same time…

So right when we started the trip I remember telling everyone where were coming from and where we were going. From Portland we said, and a slight nod followed, to Boston we said, a shocked look then a laugh along with a comment about how we had a long trip ahead of us. I remember thinking, everyday Portland would be come more impressive and Boston would become less, and indeed that is what has happened. Now the reactions have switched, Boston gets a nod and Portland gets a shocked face. I’m ready to only get shocked faces soon.

The last few days have been really great just like before the last blog. We just finished day 38 and have really only been rained on twice in the last 10 days, compare that with not being rained on twice in the first 15 days.

We have been able to see Lake Erie and Lake Ontario and the giant waterfall in between the two known as Niagra Falls. The area around the falls are incredibly touristy. It was a little overwhelming when I was simply expecting a little town and a national park of sorts to be surrounding the falls. We were able to ride a boat called the Maiden of the Mist which takes through the mist the falls create. There are 2 falls that make up the entire Niagra Falls, an American one and a Canadian one. The American one is a straight water fall but the Canadian one is a horseshoe and the boat ride takes you right into the horseshoe. They give you blue ponchos to wear to keep your clothes dry but it doesn’t really do as much as I had hoped.  That same day we also went into Buffalo to get Buffalo Wings. I didn’t know this but the reason they’re called Buffalo Wings is because they were literally invented in Buffalo. The restaurant  was called Anchor Bar, it had a pretty cool environment but it was a little pricey, and while the wings were pretty tasty they weren’t anything fantastic.

I have also grown to love coffee. This semester at school I began my venture in to the coffee world with overpriced but incredibly delicious mocha’s and now slowly worked my way up to actually prefer black coffee, which is wonderful because so many places provide it for free and if you do end up having to pay for it, it is significantly cheaper than a mocha. But that to say that today we found a diner in the country of New York named Flo’s diner and they advertised $0.10 coffee so we had to stop. They did indeed have that cheap of coffee and pretty cheap food also. So we got lunch and as a man who had talked with us earlier was leaving he gave us $30 to help cover our meal, which was awesome!

We made it into Ithica, NY and we’re hanging out at Ryan’s uncle’s house. Tonight we are going out with Katie and her mother and grandmother for dinner and I’m pretty excited about it.

Tomorrow we go to Albany, a couple more stops in Massachusetts (took me 3 times to spell that right without using the dictionary function) then we will find ourselves in Boston!

So the last few days we have had some excellent weather and pretty much all flat riding. The winds have been treating us pretty good and we even slept last night without the rain fly over our tent because we were so sure it wasn’t going to rain, and indeed it did not rain.

Two nights ago we were able to stay the night with one of Sam’s friend’s family. The way the met still confuses me but it worked out that they knew each other well enough for them to let us stay the night at their house.

After snaking our way around some crazy country roads in north central Indiana we encountered a large amount of Amish people. I had seen the signs for horse drawn buggies before but had only seen a few of them in my lifetime. We rolled through towns were they were parked by the dozen outside of general stores and we passed a good number of them on our bikes. There were even pony looking horse things pulling wagons of 2-3 little girls. As we rode by one group of Amish men they yelled something to a passing buggy and we didn’t understand anything they were saying. Turns out Amish speak Dutch to each other and only English to the outside world, it seemed that in the same way the Jews in biblical times referred to everyone else as Gentiles, so the Amish refer to everyone else as English.

That night the family we were staying with took us to meet their neighbors who were Amish and we learned quite a bit about the culture and the Amish way of life. Probably the most interesting thing we learned about the Amish was that land values in areas with more liberal groups of Amish are significantly higher than areas with more conservative groups of Amish.

That day was quite traumatic for us from a biking standpoint too, we essentially had 6 flat tires and Eric broke his back wheel pretty bad too, so that was no good for our morale.

The next day we crossed into Ohio and took the state sign pictures and the rest of the day was fairly uneventful. That night we camped at a really pretty state park and right outside the park we met a biking club from Toledo and they all had $5000 – $7000 bikes that they were all doing a time trial on and we were anxious to try our hand at the course but opted not to after thinking about the consequences the next day.

Today we had sun again and finally made it to Lake Erie! Its beautiful here and you can see the lake in a lot of places from the road. We’re camping the night outside a really neat town named Vermilion and tomorrow we’re trying to make it to Geneva, which is right on the border of Pennsylvania.

We did some math tonight and figured that we have about 780 miles left, and trying to finish a day early gives us 11 more days of biking, which puts our required average at 71 miles a day, which seems quite doable. The weather is supposed to continue to be amazing as far as we can tell. But if you have never looked at a map of New York country highways it might be worth a few minutes of your time. Apparently the area is quite quite hilly so the hills follow valleys more than grids, which makes the roads look spiderwebs rather than building blocks, so we’re not too excited about navigating through there, but we shall see.

So its been awhile since I’ve been able to post, we’ve been able to stay with some really neat people in the last few days.

Three days ago we stayed the night outside Richland Center, Wisconsin with a couple named Eric and Jamie and their 7 week old girl Robin. They lived outside of town about 6 miles and were working on building a house. They had a compost toilet and we learned that last winter they had a compost water heater! Basically we learned that things compost around 140 deg so Eric coiled some pipe around in the compost and there you go! Unfortunately it froze over because Wisconsin winters are so cold so they ended up going most of the winter without hot water! They were really fun people and Eric ended up biking into town the day after with us and showed us where the farmer’s market was and we bought some delicious cinnamon rolls.

That day we went 104 miles and made it to Jefferson, Wisconsin. That night we stayed with another really nice couple. The man was a doctor and loved cooking so dinner was fantastic and we slept really good that night. The couple were enthusiastic recumbent bike riders. A recumbent bike is a bike where the rider is really low to the ground and is kind of sitting back, I’ve always wanted to try riding a recumbent but I didn’t have the guts to ask.

Last night we were able to stay with some of my family’s old friends who live in Chicago. I grew up in Chicago until I was 9 and one of my dads coworkers / friends had a daughter who babysat my sister and I. So we stopped last night at their house and it was great seeing everyone again, apparently I had grown some since they last saw me. We had a fantastic dinner of bbq chicken, mac & cheese, and fruit salad.

This morning we were able to ride on a pretty decent trail for about 30 miles but the rest of the day was spent navigating through suburbia. We got lost twice and biked on roads that were never designed with bicycles in mind. Looking at roads on a map of the greater Chicago area is one thing but once you get there and see semi’s and no shoulder its another thing. It didn’t feel like we biked very far today but it was pretty frustrating never getting to a country road like we’re pretty used to. Tomorrow we should be out of suburbia pretty early in the morning and back on country roads again.

The trip has been going really pretty well. For the past 4 days there’s been forecast rain but we’ve only been poured on once and drizzled on a few times. And now that we’re getting further south the weather has been really warming up.

Its been really fun noticing how the further south we go the earlier the sun sets each day. And earlier on the trip each time we crossed a time zone the sunset went down obviously an hour later, but that was still neat.

We have 16 days left of biking, just finished day 28, and determined we only needed to average 73 miles to finish a day early so we can spend some extra time in Boston.

So today wraps up day 23 and we haven’t had much action in our blog because of some busy and fun days. For the past 3 days we have been biking across Minnesota on highway 10 starting in Fargo and heading to Minneapolis and St. Paul. Our good friend Will Overly joined us Sunday night in Fargo, he is from St. Paul and was our buddy in college, and Ryan and Sam finally made it back to us also.

So the first day in Minnesota was really nice weather wise but did not treat us well with bike issues. We had 4 flat tires total the whole day and Will broke a spoke. Thankfully we had enough spare tires to make it just fine and Ryan came back and picked up Will so he could make it to a bike store before they all closed. We ended up doing 100 miles that day and camped at a place called Dower’s Lake. It was a really pretty place but the mosquitoes were terrible.

We woke up the next morning in rain and like usual it took all motivation out of us. It rained on us the entire morning while we were eating breakfast and while we were packing up our stuff. Right out of camp Eric had a flat tire, then another quarter of a mile later a train came by, it was 115 cars long, and with 5 cars left before the tracks were clear the train stopped and started going backwards, all the while it was raining! We made it to the nearest gas station and camped out there for nearly two hours, the store owner graciously gave us free coffee and called his biker friend, Bob, and he came and told us all about traveling by bike around Minnesota. As the day went on it kept getting clearer clearer. That night we made it to St. Cloud, MN and the only camp site we could find there would have cost us $60, and we found a hotel for $70, so we stayed there instead.

Today we traveled the rest of the way to the twin cities and the closer it got to the actual city the crazier the roads got and the traffic got. We got to the outer most suburb and used a bike map Will had to jump on some trails and we took some really neat river trails all throughout the city and straight through downtown. Tonight we grilled hamburgers and are enjoying some fabulous hospitality from the Overly’s. Will’s wife is a graduate student in the twin cities and works as a student apartment building director so they live there, and tonight we are able to sleep in the apartment building. And apparently this week is bike to work week in the twin cities so tomorrow we are biking with Will to work to get some free breakfast then head out for the day for Wisconsin.

Good night!

We have finally made it to day 20 here on our trip, a kind of milestone I believe, and we also saw highway 29, a highway that runs through Kansas City, the first thing I’ve seen that I’m familiar with, so thats a milestone too, and this sentence is way too long.

We made it to Fargo, North Dakota / Moorhead and I’m not sure right now if were in North Dakota or Minnesota but I feel like we’ve come a long way. From Minot to Fargo we have averaged 85 miles a day and have had tailwinds everyday and have been sprinkled on for 30 seconds once.

Yesterday Eric and I rode 127 miles after Scott stayed behind to go to the hospital to get his illness checked out. He had been drinking lots of water, eating healthy, and sleeping great and he was still feeling sick after 5 days. Turned out he had some sort of a stomach virus, he got some antibiotics prescribed and now he’s feeling a lot better. The 127 was the furthest I have ever rode on a bicycle and hope to keep it that way for a while. It wasn’t a very hard day but my bottom hurt quite a bit after the day was done. We got to eat a very hardy breakfast at Eric’s families house and I was really thankful for all hospitality they showed us and for all the food they fed us! We met 2 other tourists on the road and they were heading into the wind. The previous day when we had our really fast ride, they had biked for 8 hours and only made it 40 miles, thats a 5 mph average, where as we averaged a little over 4 times that speed with the wind.

In Fargo we went a to a really cool bike shop that was in an old train station (thought of you jeff…). They had all kinds of bikes and biking clothes, much like any other bike shop, but they also had a really big workshop to fix bikes up and they had a gelato shop and a coffee shop inside. All the workers there were pretty friendly and interested in our trip thus far and shared their own tales of touring.

After 20 days its interesting to find out that what I thought would hurt doesn’t and what I didn’t know could hurt does. My legs are doing great and I thought they would continually be sore throughout the trip. I can pretty easily handle hills and we are able to bike a little longer and a little harder each day without feeling as tired. What is strange is that my fingers and my toes have been going numb and staying numb. My big toes feel like they’re numb from cold even though its 72 out and my fingers feel like they’re recovering from an anesthetic. At first it went away after awhile when we got done biking but its almost become constant now.

The only thing that really gets my spirits down these days is rain. We’ve been pretty lucky to have minimal mechanical failures, only 3 flats between 4 bikes and 1500 miles, we’ve met pretty much only kind and generous people, and we’ve been really lucky with the winds and the hills / mountains really haven’t been as bad as I envisioned them to be either. The immediate forecast for the next few days is either sunny or isolated thunderstorms.

The isolated thunderstorms has actually become my favorite forecasts to see. It means that they know it will rain a little but they don’t know where. Out here where everything is flat we can see the sky for miles and can actually see storms forming, raining, then clearing up. So the isolated part means that we can see them and the fact that there are storms means that its partly cloudy which makes for really cool pictures and really pretty views, and the sunshine pokes through about 50% of the time anyway.

Tonight Will Overly, a really good friend from college, is meeting up with us and biking with us to his home in Stillwater, MN right outside the twin cities, and Sam and Ryan are finally catching back up with us. So tomorrow we will have 5 bikers and a car and I’m looking pretty forward to it!

So a lot of records were set today and they probably won’t be broken for me in a long time if not ever.

The three records

1. Money spent in one day on this trip (minus buying a bike)

2. Amount of blog posts in one day

3. Average speed over a long distance

So today we started the morning off and went to Starbucks in Minot to wait for the bike shop to open since my bike had become its own symphony of sorts with all the sounds it made. At Starbucks nearly everyone there was interested in our trip and thought it was a great idea, and a group of four ladies even knew the family we stayed with last night.

At 9 we went to the bike shop which people from all over this area know about and showed them my bike. The mechanic was amazed I had made it this far with the back wheel in its condition. It turned out one of the casings for the ball bearings had somehow become loose and all the grease was gone and only grit and sand were in the ball bearing chamber, so the little balls were rusty and chipped. I ended up having to buy a new wheel altogether but the new one is significantly stronger than my old one, and the new one was about 100. Then this afternoon Eric and I bought our plane tickets home, which topped the dollar amount to the new record.

At Starbucks this morning I was able to blog about the last few days and now I’m able to blog about this day.

And finally the weather today, it was amazing. We were headed southeast out of Minot and the wind was blowing fiercely from the northwest. So even at its worst the wind was only hitting our shoulders slightly. The roads leading into Minot were very hilly, and going SE out of the city they were pretty much flat. So we were booking it today! I have had this goal ever since I started biking to average 20 miles an hour for 20 miles and today I blew that goal out of the water. At the beginning we were just cruising around 20-21 mph. We stopped 25 miles outside the city to go to the bathroom and eat some food. Afterward Eric and I decided to push it the rest of the way and see how high we could get our average. We ended up doing 75 miles and averaging 21.4 mph with 40 lbs of gear on our backs, granted the wind was 18 mph at our backs, but that was still a great record for me.

We were even able to race a train at one point. It was just pulling out of the station and we were going pretty even with it. We looked over at it and whether the conductor meant it as a sign or not, the engine smoked a couple times, kind of like a driver revving the engine of a car, and then the train started to get faster. We were able to keep up with it at 30 mph for about 2 minutes then we waved to the conductor that he had won, we got a toot from the whistle, then it was off.

Tonight we are staying with Eric’s family again in a town called Harvey, South Dakota and are excited about a warm place to sleep and good food to eat.

Tomorrow, 100 miles to Cooperston, unless the weather is just as awesome as today…

So we finally came to the end of day 17 here on this trip, and it feels like we’ve been gone forever. But the last 5 days have been pretty good with the exception of yesterday, we have met some neat people and have seen how Montana truly lives up to its name of Big Sky Country. We have been past the continental divide and slowly getting away from “mountain weather”, where its clear in the morning and stormy and windy in the afternoon. In Montana it was nearly flat past Great Falls and skies were nearly clear everyday. Once we got into North Dakota the terrain became rolling hills, which are pretty but on a bike they’re terrible.

We have done 2 century plus rides in the last few days, a century is a ride that is over 100 miles, we did a 135 mile day and a 103 mile day. A century is kind of considered a right of passage in the biking world I believe and I had never done one until this trip, and within 3 days I have done 2.

The first one, the 135 day, was technically 120. We were cruising in the morning with a fabulous tailwind when we noticed a storm cell that was looking pretty mean down to the south of us, and granted you can see a long way in Montana the storm appeared to be moving north east and we were headed due east so it was going to cross our path eventually. We stopped for a short break and to check the weather in a reservation town (which everyone called the res) called Harlem. While we were stopped a man, most likely a native american, came up to us and asked where we were going. We said east to Malta and were wondering if that storm we saw was going to hit us. He said it sure would, we said we were biking and it would take us 3 hours to get there, he said it wouldn’t then, after confidently answering our weather questions he went inside to do whatever he needed to do. We checked the weather on our computer and determined we had a 3 hour window of no rain to make it to the town and set up camp and get out of the rain before it started up again. As we were biking it started raining on us, and like always rain totally takes any morale we have going, so we stopped and put on all our rainproof gear and kept rolling. It was only drizzling but in about 15 miles outside Harlem we saw a pick-up truck stopped by the side of the road and a man was waving us down, it turned out to be the man at the gas station and he told us the storm was moving faster and we were giong to get caught in the storm, so we loaded up all our bikes in his pick up truck and he gave us a 15 mile ride to the next town of Dodson, Montana. His name was Charlie and he was about 45 and he worked on road construction crews but had the day off because of weather or something. Most of the conversation in the truck was dominated by talk of how bad the mosquitoes usually are in this area and how lucky we were since it had been so cold.

We are now being followed by a guy named Ryan Edick. He still has one more year of college I believe but he is a photographer and has had a dream of photographing the country and this trip was a perfect opportunity for him. He drove from Kansas to Colorado to Arizona to California and up to Oregon and followed our path all the way through until he met up with us. So he essentially drove 5000 miles in near 2 weeks! It is nice having a someone in a car following us in case something goes really wrong. A few days ago Scott started feeling pretty sick and he was able to ride with Ryan for 2 days while he got better.

Entering North Dakota was a great great feeling. We had been in Montana I believe for 8 days, the state is its own time zone, and the monotony of the last few days was starting to get tiring. We entered North Dakota on a hilly road, stopped by the sign to take pictures and kept on going to Williston. There we stopped for lunch at a McDonalds and I spent 8 dollars from the dollar menu and I was still kind of hungry at the end. From there we headed north out of town following highway 2 to take some miles off the original route. We’ve discovered a couple of places where the cycling maps we have suggest going slightly out the way in a place that really doesn’t make sense. I think its because the maps are technically trying to follow nearly the exact route Lewis and Clark took so the line isn’t always straight and because they try to avoid long stretches on major highways. But the diversion we found cut out about 35 miles total so it was well worth whatever we were missing.

Yesterday was the first day we had woken up in the rain. The previous night we had seen that the forecast was calling for rain but we hoped it was wrong like usual, but it wasn’t. We were planning on getting a real early start to make it to Minot to make it to a bike shop before it closed but the rain put a stop to that plan. Our alarms went off at 6 but it was drizzling so we kept sleeping hoping the storm would pass. At 9 it was still raining so we decided we just needed to go for it. We packed and changed as much as we could in our tent then hit the road. It rained all morning and well into the afternoon. We can usually average around 15-16 miles an hour for a day but yesterday we were just barely getting 12.5 which makes everything else seem slower. The hills were long and the wind was coming from just to our right adding to the misery. We stopped for lunch after 36 miles in a town called Stanley at the only available place. It was a decently nice burger and shake place that actually had rentable rooms in the building. We were soaked and cold and the waitresses graciously offered us towels to dry off with. We ordered our food and while were waiting and eating a lot more people all came in. This area of North Dakota is apparently experiencing and oil drilling boom so all along the highway we took we could see rather large oil drilling operations. A lot of workers up and down the highway came by for lunch also. We learned that this area was employing a technique known has horizontal drilling. They essentially drill 3-4 miles in the ground and around 2 miles start drilling diaganolly to get the pipe to turn. And in about another 2 miles the pipe is now going horizontally. We met a guy who hauled off salt water from the drilling and 2 oil rig workers and they were all pretty nice guys. The truck driver guy actually lived in the restaurant in one of their rentable rooms. We left there around 2 with 54 miles left, which was going to take about 4.5 hours of biking in the rain. Around 4 the rain finally began to ease up and the sun even poked through a little. The last 25 miles into Minot was much flatter than the previous 65 which made the ride much easier. We had managed to at the last minute hook up with a couple who were willing to let us stay at their house for the night. We got into town around 7 and found a Chinese buffet and spent an hour eating there as much as our stomachs could hold then biked to their house. They offered us laundry, a hot shower, and each of us our own bed! It was fantastic and we had only got a hold of them that afternoon, we were incredibly thankful for their hospitality and it was a much needed rest after a long day.

Today we have an easy 75 with the wind at our backs and were staying the night with Eric’s family. The next few days are forecasted to have relatively little rain and we will meet up with a buddy from college in Fargo who lives just outside the twin cities in Minnesota and he will bike a few days with us. Were also supposed to get out of this plain / agricultural country in the next few days and into lots of trees. So I am excited for the change of pace!