Start: 8:05 AM

Finish: 3:15 PM  

Saddle Time: 5:13

Ascent: 699 feet

Descent:  734 feet

Miles: 66

Total Miles: 1,674

Highlight: Staying at the Honey Hub bike hostel in Gackle

Lowlight: Trying to find something quick to eat in Napoleon, settling for gas station food only to find I passed a coffee shop/bakery on the way in to town.

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.

I setup my tent last night around 5:00, long before sunset.  Right around sunset lights came on in the park around the picnic tables but also some overhead lights in the field.  I setup my tent right under one of those lights.  I didn’t want to pull up the stakes move my tent at this point so I just figured I would sleep with a light on.  With the rainfly over the tent it wasn’t that bad.  I had to close up one of the two side to decrease the light a bit.

The light didn’t keep me awake but my knee hurt most of the night.  My fall yesterday banged me up more than I realized at the time.  I hit the inside of me knee against the bike frame and also jammed my shoulder into the ground which bothered me on todays ride.  I was concerned about the knee but once I got up and walked around it seemed to sort itself out, didn’t really bother me on the bike.

Today’s ride was excellent, started with a cool morning and temperatures rising into the mid afternoon.  It was hot by the time I stopped but mid 80’s is still cycling weather.  The wind picked up later in the morning as usual but was mostly out of the south so not much of an issue on todays ride.  The route was mostly due east with a few right hand turns to cardinal directions so the northerly portions gave me some good tailwind, too bad it was only about 10 miles.

I’m still very much in the prairie but the hills have started to subside a bit.  The shorter, steeper hills of further west have been replaced with gentle grades that are barely noticeable. I’m seeing a lot more standing water than further west.  I hate to  say ponds or lakes but I guess that’s accurate.  They have the look of water that may dry up during a dry spell, in fact some looked pretty low.  This is the most water I’ve seen since the Pend Oreille area way back in Idaho and eastern Washington.  This area clearly supports a lot of bird life including ducks. There’s an old beer can in the place I’m staying tonight that says “Gackle, North Dakota’s duck hunting capital”. The can dates back to 1979. I suspect birds is the only life these bodies of water support because I would guess they are terribly polluted with farm runoff, be it fertilizer, pesticides or manure.  Many had a noticeable green tinge and some had large amounts of algae on the surface.

I’m now seeing a lot of corn, maybe 50-50 corn to wheat.  I guess all the water makes growing corn more possible where the more arid west is better for wheat.

I haven’t mentioned the smoke mainly because I didn’t know there was smoke.  Several times while riding over the past few weeks I thought I could smell smoke.  Could just be someones BBQ but I’m usually in the middle of no where. The air has often has the appearance of high humidity but it’s not humid. I didn’t think too much of it until a couple days ago when a local told me there’s a lot more smoke in the air, much more than is normal.  You can’t smell it but you can see it. You may notice most of my photographs at a distance are not very sharp.  That’s not my poor photography skills that’s smoke in the air.  I noticed today my phones weather app list the air quality around here as poor.

At one point I saw a large dirt hauling truck parked on the side of the road heading in my direction. As I approached from a distance a guy got out of the truck, crossed the street and held out his thumb as if hitchhiking.  Well this is interesting. I stopped and said “I can’t give you much of a ride on a bike but is there anything I can do?”.  He said his truck was having diesel issues so he was waiting for help.  He said my bike has more horsepower right now than his truck.  We talked for a while.  He’s from Harlem, moved out here about 5 years ago for a trucking job.  I asked him if liked it out here. He said “it’s interesting, I’ll leave it at that”.  I should note he’s a black guy from Harlem. He clearly seemed to like the area enough to stay and buy a house.

I’m staying tonight at a bike hostel in the town of Gackle, another tiny town along this route.  A family converted a basement room into a cyclist oasis with a couple beds, bathroom/shower, wifi, microwave, laundry and various other odds and ends. There are no reservation, you just show up and sort out who stays where when you arrive. Overflow can camp out back. The room has a private entrance off the back of the house.  One thing riding a bike across country shows you is that there are good people everywhere, even those who open up their house to complete strangers asking nothing in return.

Still not sure what to do about my tire situation.  I looked into having something shipped from Amazon but I was looking at about a 1 week delivery, too far in the future for me to plan where I’ll be.  My tire will last a while on the front, it’s not that bad, no threads showing but I do want to get it replaced.  Tonight I’m going to look into some places in Fargo.