Saturday:

This entry is covering several days; sorry, I know that can be overwhelming, but you can read at your leisure. It is Saturday, July 15, and we are in a hotel room sitting here at 5:36 am gearing up to ride in the smoke.  I know, not optimal or healthy.  We have exhausted all options, and many of them are just really too expensive or are not working out.  Dickinson, ND does not have many options for us: rental cars at the airport don’t open until 5:00 pm on Saturday and they only have sedans available, not optimal for all our gear and bikes. No UHauls available, or maybe there is a 20 footer but the owners had a death in the family, so they will not open up early today.  And, there have been other ideas.  Anyway, the smoke started to impact the ride yesterday, but wasn’t horrible.  We were going to explore Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and we did ride into the park a bit - you’ll read about the park later, but didn’t see any wildlife and wanted to get on the road to benefit from the tail winds to get us to Dickinson with less effort and less heavy breathing.  Luckily, we had only 40 miles and a hotel reservation.  We spent at least six hours researching last night, and now we have decided to try and make it as far east as possible to get out of the smoke sooner, utilize the tail winds that may be up to 30 miles an hour today, and to wear our masks.  So, that is were we are.  I will upload pictures later when we have more time. 

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday:

Today was meat day and yesterday was dinosaur day, and tomorrow will hopefully be bison day if the smoke is not too bad.  Currently the air quality on the smoke maps is not looking too good for tomorrow afternoon and all day Saturday; we knew this was a possibility once we got in North Dakota.  Yes!  We are in our fourth state.  We said goodbye to Montana not too many miles away from our campsite this morning.  We really enjoyed Montana - the wild west atmosphere, the scenic beauty and the friendly people.  

I actually was a little worried about North Dakota, probably mostly because of the vastness of the landscape and the threats of potential bad weather.  So far, since we have been getting closer to the North Dakota boarder, we have had some wicked storms roll in with a vengeance and then roll out quickly bringing pleasant weather afterwards.  Last night we were at Makoshika Sate Park, Montana’s largest state park.  This park holds over 11,500 acres and is located beside the town of Glendive.  It preserves 20% of the Montana’s badlands topography; you may know this,  but I didn’t…There are badlands in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota - I always thought this topography was only in SD.  

We were lucky to get one of the remaining campsites in the park; we left Terry around 7:30 am on Wednesday morning so we could do some shopping and get to camp early; it was a pretty easy day with only around 40-50 miles, and we had tailwinds which helped get us there early enough to explore the visitor center and learn about this landscape of diverse topography and learn why this park is world-renowned as a place to study paleontology, geology and archaeology.

It was a pretty mellow day, and Mike was sleepy, so we were going to call the day pretty early, but our camping neighbors really wanted to talk with us.  Doug and his wife Sid invited us into their camper for conversation and a beer.  Doug also wanted to help in other areas.  He offered the use of his outdoor shower, he wanted to feed us, and he just really wanted to make a connection.  I kind of felt that they really needed us more than we needed them, so we were happy to spend some time with them. They have been on the road for a few months, and Doug kind of seemed starved to make a real connection, actually inviting people into their space.  This meant that I missed the interpretive presentation by the rangers at 6:00 pm, but this night wasn’t about me.

After we left them, we ate dinner, and then Mike settled in the tent for the evening.  I still needed to see more of the park, so I ventured out at dusk on my bike up the canyon - trying not to sweat.  The canyon reminded me a of mini Grand Canyon and I got a few good shots of the sun setting.  When I went back to the tent, Mike was sound asleep with the rain cover off the tent.  I had mentioned earlier that I hadn’t seen the stars much from the tent as we have had the cover on most of the trip.  We had checked the weather and there was a zero to four percent chance of rain, so Mike must have decided it was a good night to star gaze.  Well, at 1:00 am, the winds picked up and the lightening started, and this has been the pattern over the last several nights which has brought gusting winds and the rain along with it.  I started scrambling and woke Mike up, who is never very cognizant when I wake him up from a sound sleep.  He told me to get my phone to check the radar…he was sleepy.  It didn’t take long for me to convince him that we needed to get the fly out of the pannier and get it on stat!  Well, we did, and all was well.  What did we learn, we can’t trust the reports.

However, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me…well, shame on us because tonight was another stormy episode we did not fully plan for.  However, let me backtrack first.  We left Makoshika at around 7:15 this morning; I wanted to leave at 6:30 as we had a sixty-six mile day and around 2,800 feet of climbing.  Normally, we wouldn’t leave that early for that kind of day’s riding but we had reservations for Madora’s meat and musical show…Okay, it is not called a meat musical.  This town we are in is called Madora, and it is a tourist town because the Theodore Roosevelt national Park is here.  The town caters to the old west fans, and to those who admired Roosevelt and what he accomplished in terms of the national park system and conservation. I can go into the history for you, but I will just provide a link and you can peruse at your leisure and I won’t get any facts wrong…that is a new feature I am attempting to implement in this blog. Anyway, lots of people attend the Pitchfork Steak Fondue outdoor restaurant buffet; think steak on a stick and deepfried fondue style in a vat of hot oil.  Then there is also a musical that celebrates the legacy of Roosevelt and the history of the town.  

We were pleasantly surprised by the entire affair.  The food was fine, hearty; I am actually sitting in the tent right now with a stomachache, so I ate well, but it was more of the atmosphere and the views from the outdoor covered area that really made the experience something special.  We could see the vast badlands expanding over the landscape for miles from the hill in which the restaurant was situated.  Sadly, the camera was in some kind of weird mode and the photos are washed out looking.  I am annoyed by this because I asked someone to take a rare photo of Mike and me together, and it doesn’t look that great.  

After dinner, we attended the musical.  You know, it was a little Disney-like, but I loved it!  It was making me appreciate North Dakota and so happy that I was going to get to ride across this interesting place.  Well, it did not last long because you know what…yeah, a storm boomed in.  They come in quickly and with velocity.  We kind of knew something was going to happen when employees started to cover the speakers with plastic before the performance began.  The stage is set in an outdoor amphitheater. We checked the radar, and some red blob was making its way for Medora. When it hit, everyone went running up the stairs, escalator, and elevator, and to their cars…we didn’t have a car, not even our bikes.  Shame on us! We walked there from the campground; Google said it was a twenty-two minute walk - easy…not, it was up a winding hill.  Walking down in the heavy winds and rain with the mass exodus of cars was not going to be fun.  We did bring our rain jackets, but I asked strangers for a ride anyway.  Immediately a guy named Ross said he would gladly take us back as he was in the same campground.  The town is not big.

Another big adventure for Team Bean.  Now I sit. In the tent wanting to checkout the Northern Lights later this evening, but those nasty grasshoppers that have been attacking us on the miles of roads we’ve been on are now hanging on our tent, like at least a hundred, waiting for us!!!!!!!  This is the first time we have had them in camp. 

So, I mentioned the forecast for smoke earlier, and it looks like we will once again modify our plans. We were thinking that we might have to rent a vehicle and drive across ND, and I was okay with that until we experienced Madora with its history and topography. We might have a plan that will keep us healthy and still allow us to see the state by bike, and it might entail a layover day in Dickinson; not a town of significance, but you got to do what you got to do. Hopefully, we will be able to see the park in the morning and still make it to Dickinson before the smoke gets really bad; we will check maps in the morning, but I kind of feel like the forecasts haven’t been really that helpful. So, who knows.

Until tomorrow, 
Team Bean