July 18, 2016
"For funsies"
Day Forty-Eight: Ipswich, South Dakota to Ellendale, North Dakota
I slept fairly well in my bed at the Hospitality Hotel, once the workers who were sitting outside our room at the former nurses station quit talking. I did wake up a few times in the night, and my presence in a hospital room reminded me that I need to have an unpleasant medical procedure performed in the next few months, now that I’m fifty. Ugh.
We had breakfast at Subway, where I discarded half of my lousy lukewarm-egg sandwich. Unfortunately there appeared to be no place in Ipswich to obtain pancakes. There have not been enough pancakes on this tour.
We rode out of town on busy US 12, which carried a lot of traffic, but had a wide, smooth shoulder, so it was alright. After five miles of that, we turned onto a very quiet state highway, which was much more pleasant, and allowed us to ride side-by-side.
After a while we reached 2,000 miles for the trip, and stopped and took a few pictures to commemorate that milestone. Several miles later we rode off-route a mile or so to visit Leola (population 457), where we visited a grocery store and talked to the friendly woman working there. After discussing Leola’s status as the “Rhubarb Capital of the World”, we bought snacks and ate them on the shady lawn of the courthouse across from the store, then returned to the grocery where, after careful consideration, I purchased a “Rhubarb Capital of the World” t-shirt.
I wanted to investigate Leola some more, so I hung around for 15 minutes and took a few photos, while Joy biked ahead to a quiet paved local road. After I caught up we had several pleasant miles until the road ended at or near the state line, and we turned right onto gravel for several miles. The gravel road seemed to straddle South Dakota and North Dakota (according to Google Maps), so we amused ourselves by attempting to ride side-by-side, but in separate states, for a while.
By now it was hot, so we stopped and sat under a tree at a church and ate snacks while I flicked off several daddy-long-legs who crawled on my arms and legs as I lay in the grass.
We eventually grew weary of the gravel, something which always seems to happen, and rode north to an unfortunately kind-of-busy, narrow-shouldered state highway for the last miles to our first North Dakota town, Ellendale (population 1,394).
Our first stop was a convenience store where we bought cold drinks, and I was briefly interested by the television coverage of the Republican convention, which several locals were watching in the store. Joy has refused to pay attention to anything in the news during this tour, so she walked outside with her drinks, and I soon followed, because who really cares about all that crap anyway.
I obtained a sub-$40 room at the cheapest of the three motels in town, where the old man who owned the place asked if we were riding for a “cause”, or “for funsies”, an annoying expression which I will certainly never utter. I decided to go across the road to a diner where I had a just-OK burger and fries, while Joy, who wanted something more substantial, walked farther into town to a nicer place, where she ate prime rib at the bar, a meal which ended up costing her nothing after the owner of the restaurant, a woman who was interested in the bike trip, insisted on not charging her anything. Not for the first time on this trip, I had picked the wrong place to have dinner.
Today's ride: 66 miles (106 km)
Total: 2,051 miles (3,301 km)
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