Day 27: An 80, wait no, 91 mile trek to Bismark

Trigger warning for pictures of blood, half my butt, and a suspiciously large cow.

Today we woke up in possibly the most comfortable beds of the trip so far in the abbey in Richardton, ND. It may have been the 97 mile ride the day before, the sheer exhaustion of going 10 days with no rest days, or just that it was 6:00 AM, but it was tough waking up this morning. Eventually tho we crawled out of bed and got to have breakfast with the monks! Last night the monks that we met were in normal civilian clothes but today they were fully garbed up and it felt really cool walking around the abbey with them. I was really excited to have a great conversation with the monks and ask a ton of questions about their lives, what they did, and a ton of other stuff but we were informed that monks eat breakfast in silence so we had a very pleasant but very quiet breakfast just enjoying our meal. When it was finished we did have a small whispered conversation about our upcoming day and the abbey and one of the coolest things I found out was that almost all of the artwork and pottery and sculptures in the abbey were done by the brothers themselves. For example: 

These were just pictures in our rooms and there were a bunch of others that were very impressive so I thought it was cool to find out monks have an artistic side! 

Ok so onto our day! We ended up leaving the abbey around 9:00 but that really meant we left at 10:00 because about 12 miles into our trip we finally switched time zones again and jumped forward an hour. Just one more to go and we are back on our normal schedules! That being said, to avoid another 12 hour day we started booking it to our destination in Bismarck. Today was another day going pretty much straight East and the tailwind at our backs was blowing hard. One of the weird things about tailwinds on a bike is that you don’t really feel it, it’s just as if all the wind normally rushing past you has disappeared. That being said we were pushing 15-20 mph for the majority of the day. There was a 2 mile segment getting on the highway where we were going against the wind and that was like biking into a brick wall we were going so slow. We had met a German couple biking West at the beginning of the day and i can’t imagine the headwinds they must’ve had to face. 

Once we were on the highway, the major obstacle we had to deal with other than cars flying by us at 80 mph were these weird rumble strips on the shoulder that were spaced about 20 feet apart and covered the entire shoulder other than a 1 ft segment, on the other side of which was loose gravel. These rumble strips would be my downfall today (literally) as I have apparently decided to switch from getting flat tires like they are participation trophies in a youth soccer league to just straight crashing instead. My best guess at what happened was the wind shifted a little suddenly and pushed me into the loose gravel (remember it was a tight squeeze between the rumble strip) but I took a pretty bad spill and got some solid road burn because of it. If you are grossed out by that then skip past the pictures I’m about to show of the damage.

 

The last one is pretty blurry because Julia was busy being an EMT rather than a photographer but she patched me up nicely and we were ready to get back on the road! Thankful we were only about 5 miles from New Salem where we stopped for lunch and saw a super large sculpture of a cow in the distance. 

The whole town was cow themed and honestly they rocked it pretty well.

At this point we were 33 miles from finishing our 80 mile day and we were all pretty ready to be done with it and have a nice rest day tomorrow. Unfortunately every time we asked Dustin how much farther we had to go he kept adding more miles to the count so we could get to our campsite. This of course brought an already annoyed Julia (because everyone other than Pat had accidentally bumped into her bike or cut her off today) to even further annoyance (she also had to pee which didn’t help) and by the time we finished our 91 mile day we were all ready to get off our bikes and not even look at them until the rest day was finished. We are now holed up in a KOA in Bismarck and will stay here for our desperately needed rest day tomorrow! 

Photo Dump:

“Ow” - Brian