Gig Harbor Washington to Bar Harbor Maine 2001

I guess the lesson to learn is that you should not make plans if you don't know what you're talking about.

It was the same plains, all the same conditions. There was no reason why we shouldn't be blown like tumbleweeds 103 miles to Havre. Back to back centuries with smiles on our faces. I met the gang at Main Street at 7:30, even though I stayed up till 2 uploading stuff. Gridley wanted to get on the road, the rest of us wanted to revisit the 3 Hens for breakfast. First mistake. It took an hour and a half to get served and eat. It did give me a chance to talk to another rider, Tod Rodger, who wrote a book about riding the Lewis and Clark trail. (www.deerfootpublications.com)

So it was nearly 10 when we finished eating and grocery shopping. Garcia was off like a shot and Kathryn and I hung back and rode together awhile. The tailwind was there as planned, but not quite as strong as yesterday. There was a little more climbing than expected.

No place to hide

We stopped at the store in Devon to use the facilities. There's no place to hide on the prairie. The woman who ran the place was very interesting and interested. The store is mostly a consignment outlet for local crafts. She told us they were in the 4th year of drought and most crops were already a total loss for the season. An old-timer who remembers about 90 years of the area said he'd never seen their pond dry before, and it was now bone dry. Others say it reminds them of dust bowl days in the 30's. She also showed us her guest book, signed by nearly every cross country biker.

When Garcia stopped at the bike shop in Anacortes our third day out, he heard about the "3 hot babes" that had come through a week earlier. Alex, who we met in camp before Washington Pass, knew one of the babes and was trying to catch them. We heard about them in the bike shop in Whitefish, the blueberry pie place in Kiowa and from several bikers. It had begun to sound like the urban myth to keep horny riders on the route. But there were their signatures. They'd even left a note for Alex, who apparently skipped the stop.

The route is becoming a 4000 mile soap opera. Tom, a fireman from the Quad Cities (somewhere in the midwest) had camped with us in Glacier after the pass. He'd come in late after riding during verboten hours and after leaving from Whitefish. It took us two days from Whitefish. We heard about him all day long. I'm pretty sure he did 200 miles today.

The wind began shifting around, spending less and less time on our tails, while the hills became steeper. We struggled into a park in Chester and ate some bagels and pb with the book guy and Garcia, who'd killed time waiting for us and avoiding the road. I plowed on and left them to fend for themselves.

We'd had a thin cloud cover that kept the sun from cooking us but now it evaporated like our spit. I spent the rest of the afternoon looking for shade. I found a tree about 20 miles after Chester and took a half hour nap under it. A few miles later I saw Gridley standing in the shade of a tavern. He'd been there about 3 hours waiting for us and for the heat to subside. I joined him and rapidly pounded a fake beer, some gatorade and a grapefruit juice. It was impossible to keep hydrated in this sun.

After a few minutes Garcia and Kathryn came in. Shortly after I'd left them in Chester, his bike disintegrated. He had two more broken spokes and the derailleur cable housings fell apart. They hitched a ride in a pickup. Gridley had just talked to the bike shop in Havre and knew there was time to get there and probably get the bike fixed on our layover.

Gridley and I contemplated going across the street to the Chester pool, but decided to press on. Second big mistake. It was ungodly hot. The sun was just low enough to be out of our faces, high enough to sear the rest of our flesh. We rode directly into the wind no matter how much the road turned. It was 33 miles from Chester to Havre and each one was a sonofabitch. I found one more tree to stand under the entire way.

The intoxicating aroma of the wildflowers alongside the road (lavender?, clover?) is all that kept me going. Like coca leaves for South American slaves.

We were riding about 13 mph when we got within about 13 miles. One hour to go. Then the wind beat us down to 8 mph when we were about 8 miles out. One hour to go. When we finally got within 5 miles, a hill slowed us down to 4.5 mph. We're always going to be an hour away.

I was thinking of Twilight Zone plots, some variation of "To serve Man - It's a cookbook!", as we spun on our rotisseries in the convection oven of the prairie. I thought of how Garrison Keillor and Laura Ingalls made the prairie sound so cute and quaint. The bugs must have gotten to them, eaten their brains.

We'd agreed that the kids would find a motel and relay directions through Darsey. I stopped in some shade on the edge of town to wait for Mike to catch up and call but the place was guarded by some sort of piranha flies and I went out to cook in the sun instead, riding just fast enough to keep the bugs from finding me. We climbed the inevitable long, steep hill into town and found the motel.

It does have a separate room for each bed and the shower works, no one stabbed me in it. The air conditioner keeps the hot air moving. I'll try to think of something else positive to say about it (as they idle their pickups outside my window at 8 Sunday morning).

We walked to the Pizza Hut, dodging kids in cowboy hats and pickups cruising Main Street on Saturday night. We ate an enormous amount of food and stopped at the grocery store on the way back for more. And for some aloe vera. I kept slathering sunscreen on all day, but my legs were on fire and were covered with welts. Rubbing ice on them before dinner and aloe after returned them to a normal sunburn.

It wasn't our best day, but I had thought that a day off was premature - that we hadn't earned it yet. That has changed, I'm not moving.

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