There were a couple of hills in the first five miles east of Havre, but the next stretch of Highway 2 did not seem to ascend or descend a single foot.  I have never experienced a flatter 38 consecutive miles in my life.  The only drawback to such a perfectly flat road can be summed up in the following conversation with myself:

"Hey! I see a grain elevator just ahead.  I'm almost to Chinook already."

"Ya think so?  Chinook is still seven miles away, ya dumb ass!"

What the sarcastic me said to the naive me was painfully true.  It took almost an hour to get to that grain elevator.  It seemed SO close in that deceptive flatness.  Part of the problem was that the wind had shifted directions last night and I faced a brisk headwind all afternoon.  Obviously I knew this would inevitably happen.  I accepted the fact and pedaled on.  Yet, even with that mindset, it still wasn't pleasant.  Even if you discount the harder work--which I've never been afraid of--the constant sound of the wind blasting in your ears has the same irritation factor as the drone of a radio that is not correctly tuned in to a station, and letting the static blast over the loudspeakers for hours at a time.

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I made it to Harlem.  Not THAT Harlem.  A different Harlem.  This Harlem is a town of about 800 people, but like the more famous Harlem, it's somewhat poor and depressing.  It has a small, dusty downtown area with just a few businesses and not much else.  Today, just my luck, all of those businesses are completely shut down due to a citywide power outage.  Even the grocery store was closed, so I had to rely on my food reserves for dinner.

My Adventure Cycling information told me that the town welcomes bicyclists to camp in its city park and, sure enough, I found the city park right next to the city hall and the city swimming pool, and there was a big brown sign that read "WELCOME TO HARLEM--BICYCLISTS CAMP HERE."

Immediately upon my arrival, a five-year old kid named Nathaniel came running up and asked me all kinds of questions and began spinning my bike's pedals, squeezing the brakes, turning the crank, and shifting the gear levers despite my repeated requests to stop.  He was bare-footed and clearly his parents didn't seem to know or care where he was or who he was bugging.  Before long, six other boys were hanging out with me as well.  They were swarming me like mosquitoes.  (There were plenty of real mosquitoes swarming me too.)

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A guy named Keith came along and told the kids to go home.  Keith had been living in Harlem for only the last week after relocating from the capitol city of Helena.  He had recently been hired as a teacher and will begin his job at the elementary school in three weeks.  In the meantime, he is obviously bored with the nothingness in this town.  I feel bad for him and I'd be surprised if he makes it all the way through the school year.

It was bad enough camping in a very small patch of grass next to the town's swimming pool, but add to that the presence of a 24-hour laundromat directly across the street and the result was a very poor night of sleep.  Sometime in the evening, the town's electricity came back on and all of the laundromat's backlog of customers rushed in.  Later on, it got worse.   I might be off base here, but I'm guessing that most people who do laundry between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. in a town this size are probably just getting out of the bars.  And there were plenty of them.  And they were loud.  And they let the door slam every time they went in or out.  It made me very nervous.  Why couldn't the power have stayed out until morning?