Day 28: finally a rest day!

“If you don’t pick a rest day, the rest day picks you” -Leo

As you may have noticed from our past couple blog posts, these past couple days have been a bit rough. Dustin’s girlfriend, Pascale, even had to check in with the “are you ok? The blog’s a little bleak.” After the many falls, flats, headwinds, and overall fatigue we finally decided to take a day off and enjoy the capital of North Dakota. Thank god!

This morning I was able to happily not set an alarm and roll out of bed at 9:30am. Somehow even without an alarm, Dustin still managed to wake up at 7:30am…. psychopath behavior.  It was so lovely to just take the morning slow, and escape to the women’s locker room for some much needed self care. After being pinned as the stinky one of the group, the long shower was much needed. However, Brian was ready to send out a search party if I didn’t come back soon. 

We then spent the afternoon with Pat and Leo, who are staying at a hotel down the street (we are cheap, broke medical students, so we were very content with camping). We stopped at a bike shop for Pat to get some industrial strength tires, Leo to get Gatorade bottles that don’t leak, Dustin a “drunk since 2007” hat (checks out), and Brian a new shirt since we all saw how he ripped his other one during his fall. 

Afterwards, we went to the Dakota Zoo! This was incredible! As you may remember from my very first blog, I am a huge NatGeo fan. My roommates will attest to coming home and finding me curled up on the couch watching Secrets of the Zoo: Tampa for hours on end instead of studying…. I think that qualifies me as a zoo vet expert…maybe? 

Well we got to see so many animals. We were especially excited to see the bison and grizzly bears since there were high likelihoods that we were supposed to see them while biking, but just haven’t. After seeing the massiveness of those bears and am very happy to have seen them from behind a fence. We also got to see the belly of a white bengal tiger because it was on top of the glass viewing dome. There was a debate of what would win in a fight: a tiger or a grizzly bear? I personally think tiger because they are stealthy and hella quick. If you have made it 28 days into our blog, comment below who you think would win in a fight. 

After the zoo we caught an Uber back to the KOA, where we thought we would cool off in the pool for a bit, but a kid had an accident in the pool. However, when the pool did re-open there were about 5 kids in it and that was 5 kids too many for Dustin. I swear by the end of this trip I am going to make these boys like kids more. We instead tossed a baseball around, listened to some music, and walked down to a local pizza place. This pizza had a 10/10 cheese pull! 

We wrapped the night out with me changing Brian’s wound dressings and just chatting about life…. you know, like any typical evening. Alright so it’s back to biking tomorrow, and I should probably stop standing by the single RV electrical outlet like a weirdo and go to bed. Julia signing off!