“Oh no, they’re going to take all the burritos away!”

July 14, 2016 to July 15, 2016

Days Forty-Four and Forty-Five: Howes, South Dakota to Pierre, South Dakota

I slept well on the small mattress in the cabin; Joy, however, reported that she was awakened multiple times when I asked “What’s going on?” whenever she turned over in her sleeping bag on the floor. I have no recollection of this.

We knew today was going to be a long day — the longest so far of this trip, since our destination was Pierre, about 100 miles away on the very empty highway we’d been on all day yesterday — so we were riding away from Howes at 5:30.

It was cool. The birds were singing, and we heard some coyotes making their eerie sounds. After a fast descent to the Cheyenne River, we started the long climb that multiple people had warned us about yesterday. After what we’d seen in New Mexico and Colorado, it was no big deal, of course.

For a while on the climb I rode beside Joy, attempting to amuse her with various inside jokes. Years ago, we had watched the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, which I’d seen before and liked, but which Joy mocked mercilessly, especially the wooden acting of the female lead, Andie MacDowell. She especially enjoyed ridiculing the famously cheesy concluding line: “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed” This morning as we rode slowly up the hill, I asked “Are we… climbing?… I hadn’t noticed.” That only elicited a grimace, so I tried a few other conversation starters. “You can’t escape me and my insights!” I said as we climbed at 3.0 mph. “Oh yes I can” responded my wife, who slowed to 1.7 mph. She was right. I can’t ride that slow without falling down, so I went up the hill by myself.

Not much else of note happened in the first few hours of the ride, other than my noticing that Joy was consuming some sort of fruit/vegetable pouch called “Happy Squeeze”, the name of which I found especially hilarious for some reason. Lately lots of things have seemed hilarious during the hours of riding each day, a signal perhaps that it’s close to time to come home.

Yesterday several people had told us about a gas station and cafe called “T-34”, cleverly named after the intersection of highway 34 (the one we were riding on) and another road. Miles before we got there I started imagining what this store, the last place to purchase anything for almost 70 miles, might contain. A group of motorcyclists, the most traffic we’d seen all morning, passed us, and Joy, assuming they were also on the way to T-34, called out, “Oh no, they’re going to take all the burritos away!”

As it happened, we soon arrived at T-34 to find the place empty of motorcyclists, and in fact empty of everyone except the very taciturn proprietor. I was able to engage him in a minimal conversation, just long enough to order a simple breakfast for each of us, which he took an astonishingly long time to prepare — like, 45 minutes to prepare a couple of breakfast sandwiches.

After that we rode past a sign that informed us there would be no services for the next 66 miles, and the already light traffic thinned for the next several hours. This was some of the most unvarying scenery of the entire trip. Pleasant, but surprisingly hilly. Days ago, another cyclist had described this section as “long rollers”, but Joy decided that was inaccurate, and said the “rollers” should be called “grinders.” Later I modified that as “grollers.”

With 30+ miles to Pierre, the state highway combined with a US highway, and suddenly it got unpleasantly busy, with lots of truck traffic. Fortunately, the shoulder remained wide. If there’d been no shoulder on this section, it would have been completely unrideable. Unrideable by me, anyway. I would probably have hitchhiked.

We stopped at the Little Brown Church on the Prairie. It’s a small brown church that is literally the only landmark for many miles on this highway. We walked our bikes behind the church, got out our camp stools, ate some snacks, rested, and reapplied the hated sunblock. The rear of the church would have been a barely-acceptable camping spot, but we had reservations at a bed and breakfast in Pierre, so we got back on the busy road.

We’d done 70 miles by 2:00 Mountain Time, which was pretty good, but then we crossed into the Central time zone, and lost an hour. I hate when that happens.

It continued to be annoyingly hilly. It was a mystery: It felt like we were climbing 80% of the time today, and yet somehow we were going to end up at a lower elevation in Pierre. We finally got a nice downhill to the Missouri River, where I had one of my occasional bridge-crossing freakouts when I realized that the Missouri was actually pretty damn wide, and the bridge was actually very busy. After transferring to the pedestrian walkway on the bridge, which involved heaving both bikes over a fence, conditions improved, and we made it to Pierre (population 13,984), which is the capital of South Dakota.

After a stop at a convenience store for cold drinks and snacks, we climbed up one last hill into a residential area and checked into the Hitching Horse Inn, a nice B&B. My odometer read 99.2 miles, while Joy’s read 99.8, somehow. It was close enough to a century ride, and we were tired enough, that we were going to reward ourselves with a day off in Pierre tomorrow.

The outhouses at the store/campground seemed pretty popular with the local population.

Thought I found a beer for Joy, but it was empty.

Today's ride: 99 miles (159 km)
Total: 1,838 miles (2,958 km)

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