This is Jason. He and his wife Ginny have the Honey Hub. I would of taken Ginny’s picture but she was cleaning the pool and I am sure she wouldn’t want her picture taken. They are also bee keepers and have 17,000 hives around North Dakota. We keep riding by hives in different areas and now we know who owns them all. In the winter they go into a warehouse here in Gackle and then in February they get shipped to California to pollenate there.
I can’t believe we have l been on the road a month now. Seems like it’s taken a long time and then again it has flown by. I forgot to check the weather before we packed up this morning so I just walked outside. It seemed warm enough that we only needed our yellow biking jackets. We had to stop at the store to pick up water so by the time we really started pedaling it was 7:45. We knew we would probably have a little head wind but boy were we wrong. It was nonstop. No reprieve at all. I got to see lots of boy and girlfriends but didn’t take pictures of all of them. I did however talk to all of them. They look at us so curiously and are so cute. When we came upon the Dinosaurs on the Prairie, we had to get a picture for 2 reasons. One, it was a neat idea what they did with old machinery and two, we had to show you the flags blowing so you could see the headwind we were dealing with. Of course I always stop to rest and take more pictures. We had gone about 20 miles when we saw a biker coming the other way. We stopped to chat. His name is David and he is traveling from Portland Maine to Washington state. He said he started in June, took a week off in NY to stay with his girlfriend and 2 days in Chicago. This kid is hauling ass. He said he tries to do 70 miles a day. Oh by the way, he is only 28 years old. Safe travels David. As we went a bit further we had to take a left. OMG! A Tailwind. We had to go a little over 8 miles and it was glorious. The tailwind made the hills feel like nothing, but it also came to an end way to fast. ☹️. Yup, back to the dreaded headwind for another 11 miles. Again we ended up taking off our da brims as it does make a difference in the wind. We finally made it to Gackle and needed to find our warm showers. It’s a really neat place. They call it the Honey Hub for cyclists as they are bee keepers here in Gackle 3 months of the year and live in California the rest of the year. They have everything listed for us, things and places to see in town and they even have a washer and dryer in the room. A big shoutout thank you for hosting cyclists. We went into town to have lunch at the only restaurant and when we got there, there was one person sitting at the bar and a woman behind the bar. Turns out she was the owner and her name is Nicole. She said for lunch they only had a salad bar and that was ok with us. We went into the other room to make our salads and she asked if we wanted to eat in the other room and I said, “No, we want to sit at the bar and chat with you two”. So we did and we learned that she was a teacher, the guy at the bar is a Bismarck firefighter and he helped us with our routes from here to Fargo. It was very pleasant. Nicole, the owner is also a teacher and owns the restaurant with her husband. After lunch we went to the Co-op grocery to get water and other things. We wanted to get a small thing of milk as we brought our Raisin Bran with us but seeing there wasn’t a fridge in our room we weren’t sure how we would keep it cold. I asked the woman there if they sold styrofoam coolers and the only one she had was a big one. Next thing you know she is on the phone with the people who run the warm showers and yes, they have a fridge in the breezeway right outside our room. Yippee, we can have Raisin Bran again tomorrow morning. We went back to the restaurant for dinner and whoa, it was way busier. Lots of locals. When we were leaving I said to Hubs, “did you see everyone looking at us.” They must of thought strangers in town. 😜 Tomorrow is another 70+ miles. Right now it looks like we may have a tailwind. 🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞. What a great help that would be. We will be going to Enderlin ND and will probably have to camp as the only hotel in town is booked. She said to call tomorrow as who knows, maybe some one will cancel. So if we have to camp I don’t know if there will be wifi so I may not be able to post the blog till the next day.
