Thursday, May 28, 2009

Day 47 - Chester to Shelby, MT




Miles biked for the day: 42
Total miles to date: 2424

We woke up and cooked a huge breakfast including sweet potato hash, Canadian bacon and veggie scrambled eggs. I am thoroughly enjoying the chance to cook more now that I have three people in my party. In order for me to cook by myself proves challenging because I cannot purchase food in a smallest enough quantity and I cannot bring leftovers along with me.

Something else I have found incredibly enjoyable is the opportunity to draft behind each other while heading into the wind. Nicole and I, the more experienced of the 3, enjoying getting as close as possible to the person in front of us. This works great until we collide with the tire in front of us. Nicole and I have already fallen several times from this and put us into a laughing frenzy. Today although might have been the funniest moment when I felt a bump on my tire and as I look over my shoulder I see Nicole riding down the ditch as the last resort to avoid crashing yet again. She was standing in the grass waving as a sign of "everything is OK" and I could no longer pedal because I nearly fell down laughing so hard.

I have been biking on highway 2 for nearly two weeks and until you reach Glacier National Park Montana offers very little in the way of interesting sites. In fact, in our delirious state we have somehow come up with a game of counting silos. Whoever can spot the silos and count them correctly first wins a point. This sounds easy, but with the row of 45 silos we had to count more than 4 times to check for accuracy.


We stopped for lunch and saw a solo touring cyclists coming our way. We crossed the road and started cheering, jumping up and down and looking forward to chatting with a fellow traveler. Our bubbles burst as he rode by at 20mph (since he had tails winds) and he said, "You girls are going the wrong way." In amazement we saw him ride away without stopping to say hello. Our feelings were hurt! Two miles later we saw two more cyclists coming our way and we crossed the road to greet these fellow travelers. These two young men were super cute and sweet! We had a brief 15 minute exchange and wished each other well for the other's journeys.

At one point on the road Nicole felt down and lacking energy until she found her new friend laying in the grass. She picked up this strange plastic object which was unidentifiable while riding by on a bicycle. It was a gorilla squeaky toy (to be pictured soon) with a long red tongue that sticks out when you squeeze him. I am not sure how or why but this new object, later named Kremlin, gave Nicole a burst of energy and entertainment for many more miles down the road. Kremlin is still with us today as our team mascot.

We put in a full day of riding battling some extremely strong headwinds and victoriously completed 42 miles. We opted for a hotel that evening and had a great night in. We appreciated the beds and showers, even Kremlin received a sink bath.

For dinner Nicole and Gretchen went to Pizza Hut to pick up dinner and I went downtown to grab some take out Chinese dinner. When we reunited to eat dinner at the motel we learned of each other's adventures. Nicole chose to wear my sarong (with nothing underneath) on one of the windiest days. As she approached the entrance to Pizza Hut the wind threw her sarong to the side and she full on flashed all of those around her. While we ate our dinner in the motel we saw a cop car pull up to our motel and Nicole feared that they were after her for the accidental streaking incident. In actuality one of our neighbor motel residents had to visit the hospital escorted via an ambulance thus the arrival of the police officer. After we ate our dinner I proposed a trip to the ice cream stand and realized I did not have my wallet (which consists of a plastic bag with my money, credit card and driver's license). After all three of us torn apart the motel room, I thought I would bike back downtown to retrace my steps. I made it to Main Street and I saw a plastic bag flapping in the wind. This plastic bag filled with such necessities had been laying in the middle of Main street for over an hour! It was in that moment I was so thankful that I did not have a real wallet but instead a plastic bag as it just looked like junk lying in the middle of the road. When I returned to the motel we had 5 minutes left until the ice cream stand closed and out of my excitement for not losing my wallet I bought a round of ice cream for the team.

I failed to mention another funny story. We ate breakfast several days ago in a small town diner and noticed the menu had a "Low Calorie Breakfast Plate." We found the title for this plate quite amusing because the breakfast items included: 2 pieces of bacon, one egg, one piece of toast, coffee and juice. We thought to ourselves, "Surely the bacon is Canadian bacon or something "low cal". In our curiosity we asked our friendly waiter, "What kind of bacon is on your low cal breakfast?" She said, "the good kind of bacon." We had to hold in our laughter because the only reason this dish was cleverly labeled Low Calorie is it did not have 6 pieces of bacon on the plate. I think we should talk to some authorities and invest in nutrition education programs to the people of Montana.

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