Start: 7:50 AM

Finish: 3:00 PM  

Saddle Time: 5:11

Ascent: 769 feet

Descent:  1,247 feet

Miles: 66

Total Miles: 1,560

Highlight: Eating Thai food for lunch.

Lowlight: A 5 mile stretch of road about 10 miles outside Bismarck, an old and poor quality road with more traffic than I’ve had in recent days.

Cyclemeter:  Follow this link to see the data I’m collecting with the cyclemeter app. You can see gps information, speed, elevation, distance, cadence and heart rate. Better viewed on a computer where it’s easier to play around with the graphs.

Great riding conditions today, one of the coolest mornings I’ve had to date, almost chilly. I’m in central timezone now so the sun is coming up about an hour later making for a cooler start. The motel owner warned me about a length of dirt road coming up. She said many cyclists prefer getting on the interstate to avoid the dirt road.  I’ve been happy with my interstate riding so I went with the suggestion.

The route crossed the interstate about 5 miles down the road where I jumped on for the next 25+ miles.  I started on the interstate earlier and stayed on longer since I was making such good time, I banged out 30+ miles in about 2 hours.  I’m sure everyone thinks riding on the interstate is crazy but you haven’t ridden through Montana, that’s crazy.  After the interstate the route followed Old Highway 10 for the rest of the way into Bismarck. Most of the road was in fine condition and not heavily traveled but the scenery was nothing different from what I’ve been seeing for a while. So a good day of riding but visually a little boring.  The wind also wasn’t much of an issue most of the day, neither good nor bad.

Road conditions deteriorated as I got closer to Bismarck, seemed like an old road that was never updated with narrow or non existent shoulders and a poor road surface.  I was banging on cracks in the road every 10 yards or so. The route crossed the Missouri River and moved on to bike paths for most of the way into Bismarck.

I came across a Thai restaurant about 1.5 miles from my hotel.  It was only about 2:00 PM kind of early to check in to the hotel and I was hungry so I turned around and went in for some pad thai.  The more I looked at the menu the more I was looking forward to this meal.  The waiter joked “one of everything?”  Little does he know how much I can eat and how much I’ve been craving anything but burgers or steak. We talked for a while, he was from Montana so he totally understood my situation. I told him how I was looking forward to this meal.  He said, “good, you will have leftovers”.  I said, “I don’t think so, I’m on a bike tour”. I finished off the pad thai so he brought out spring rolls on the house.  I think he was trying to break me.  I finished off the spring rolls but felt like I was going to throw up for then next couple hours.

Bismarck is the largest city I’ve been in since Great Falls which was largely shutdown when I passed through for the 4th of July. I do feel a little overwhelmed after being in the middle of nowhere for so long.

I made it to the hotel around 3:00, Raddison where I found a good deal on a $60 room, beats camping.  My room wasn’t ready so I went to the supermarket to pick up food for breakfast. By the time I had my room it was well after 4:00.  I had hoped for a long afternoon of getting up to date with the blog and some other things I wanted to do but the day was ending quickly. You would think finishing mid afternoon would leave a lot of downtime but everything takes so much longer when on a bike tour.

I went to the local brewery for dinner which was very good.  For the beer drinkers out there, I’ve found more selection of beer out here than back home where the beer menu is a list of a half dozen IPA’s.  This place had IPA, a couple stouts, an amber, Belgian strong, Belgian golden rye, a few sours and fruit beers. Most places also server food unlike back home where they are just tasting rooms with food trucks in the parking lot. People out here seem to strongly favor light beer which occupies all the taps in bars but breweries are an escape from Bud Light.

I’m not sure how I will ride tomorrow.  There’s a bike hostel I’ve heard good things about 110 miles from here, too far for me in one day, don’t want to end up injured or just hating it.  I have options for 45 or 70 mile rides.  The 45 mile ride sets me up for a decent ride the next day while the 70 mile ride is more the distance I want to cover but the following day will be too short so I would likely just skip the hostel.  Right now I’m leaning towards skipping the hostel to make forward progress.  I’ll see how tomorrow goes and make the call when I get to the 45 mile point.  I’m not going to make any reservations.