Day 25: it’s all downhill from here…not

Alright so today was officially the earliest we have ever gotten up and onto the road…. 4am wake up…. 6am start. I (Julia) wish I could say that I got a restful night sleep, but I was lucky enough to have the street light shining on my tent all night. However, last night was the first time that Dustin slept through the night this entire trip, and he was ecstatic…. that meant I had to bring annoyance to his morning. 

How to annoy Dustin 101: ask him to help you lube the chain of your bike 2min before we are about to leave when he is clearly in the middle of something. Then when he asks you to help, do everything wrong. I swear one of these days I’ll learn how to do maintance on this bike, but then what is Dustin going to do, you know? 

We get moving on our day joined by Leo and Pat again, and lucky lucky us get a lovely headwind almost right off the bat. And guess what… the headwind stays with us all day. As we are making our way, I all of a sudden get a text from Brian about 10miles into our ride. I bet you can guess what that text said: “I got a flat.” Alright, so for those at home who are keeping track, this now makes 5 flats for Brian (but he’s gone through 7 tubes). 

At this point, Pat, Leo and Dustin were about to go up a hill and were 1/4 mile ahead of me, so I give them a call to let them know what’s up. I meet the boys at the top of the hill and use good ole Find Friends to figure out how far back Brian is. He is a solid 3miles back. We are quickly informed that Brian called my parents to meet up with him, so the 4 of us decide to keep going and Brian ended up catching a ride with my parents to meet up with us 20miles down the road. 

Well the next 20 miles us four was absolutely miserable. There were headwinds. There were hills after hills. There was more crying. It’s been said before and I’ll say it again: whoever said Eastern Montana is flat, is a bold face liar. We eventually got some relief with some slight downhills, but the wind still made them awful. Thankful we found a wonderful diner in Glendive, where we feasted on a great brunch. The workers were incredible and filled all our water bottles up with ice cold water and off we went again for the last 30miles of our 77mile day. 

The route ended up putting us on a full blown highway. Now praying 18 wheelers don’t blow you off the road will certainly get the adrenaline pumping. I just kept calling to Leo asking him when we would get off the highway, and the answer was never soon enough. We get to our exit, but Pat and Dustin miss it and stay on the highway, while Leo, Brian and I get off and start traveling on a country road. We quickly realized that we wished we took the chance with the highway traffic. The country road was rolling hills, headwinds, and 2 miles longer. It was absolutely demoralizing. By the time we were ready to connect back to the highway for the last 5 miles, the three of us were absolutely destroyed. (Check out @leo_and_pat_bike_cross_country on Instagram to see Leo’s live take on the awful situation) We hitched a ride with the rents to the hotel and called it a day. 

Like how we end all our days, we made our way over to a local bar (The Shamrock), Dustin got his beer, his personality switch 180 degrees, and we were all somewhat alive again. Sorry I have no pictures from today. I was too busy dying, but hey check in tomorrow because we will FINALLY be out of Montana! Thank freaking god.