slowing down

Today I woke up, once again, not in the mood for bicycling. Those of you who know me well are probably well aware of the fact that I am not a morning person. Despite waking up at 5:30 am, on average, on this trip, I am still not a morning person. I generally spend the first 10 miles of the ride going fairly slowly to warm up and ease into the day. Today, I just got stuck in that mode and couldn’t seem to pick up the pace.

The ride prior to lunch was beautiful. Lovely scenery. Lovely temperature. And a lovely (though slow) pace.



After lunch it was like I went through a wormhole into another land. The sun showed its might and blazed down upon us throughout the afternoon. The wind turned against us so that now we were having to ride into and fight it. Hills seemed to come out of nowhere. And we entered an area of the state that has recently been flooded, and the water still covered many of the surrounding lands – we saw washed out bridges, flooded homes, and flooded train tracks.

The afternoon went much slower than the morning, and at the last check point at mile 80, I had Rich give me a pep talk. He graciously complied, and it helped a lot. I hope to teach him several of my favourite inspirational songs so that he can sing them to me to complement future pep talks – I have the feeling that there will be many of them!

We rolled into Billings, Montana where we’ll have a rest day (phew!) and stay in the dorms of Montana State University. A catering company, Beyond Basil, provided dinner in a nearby park this evening, and it was so wonderful. They had garlicky gazpacho, all kinds of salads, steaks, cupcakes, and ice cream. It was embarrassing how much I ate (unfortunately, my friend Kathleen did obtain photographic evidence of the amount of food on my plate)!

We picked an interesting time to come to Billings as an Exxon pipeline just broke near here today as decribed in this article.

We also passed through Twodot, Ryegate (home of the “Testicle Festival” -- the testicles of bulls are considered a delicacy and referred to as "Rocky Mountain Oysters"), and Roundup (yep, this is actually a town in Montana). We also passed through Yellowstone County, which is exciting even though we won’t get to go through the Yellowstone Park.