Coast to Coast for a Cause 2022

Hey y’all it’s Dustin here - we had a pretty good and for the first time in awhile an uneventful day! No flats, no crashes, not a scratch! This morning we headed out from the KOA in Bismarck and stopped at a gas station to pick up some breakfast - I had a taco sub which apparently is a common thing around here (it has taco meat, cheese, and some veggies) and then some cheese-its and coffee (yeah yeah I know, I never drink it but these early mornings day after day have worn me down).  Unfortunately, my cleats weren’t clipping into my petals anymore, but fortunately I saw this coming and bought some new ones the day before. Only thing is, Leo has them and they stayed at a hotel lastnight - not the KOA… so we rode the first 15 miles with one foot unclipped until we met up with Pat and Leo for the day. I changed the cleats out quickly and we were off on our way!  Today, like many days recently, was an unchanging scenery - just fields of hay and pastures, not much else to be seen. ...

“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 m...

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 o...

Hey y’all - last night we stayed in a hotel because we forgot what a real life bed felt like - but like a $45 a night hotel - so while there were surely some quirks - we were just grateful to have a roof over our heads and not be sleeping on the ground. One of those quirks though was that the AC didn’t work (kind of a tease honestly having an AC unit in the room that does run but not well enough for the room to cool down - so I woke up this morning probably more sweaty than any bike ride we’d been on so far. And because of that I’m starting to rethink this whole all naturalé, no deodorant thing…  Last night Leo and Pat stayed in a different room so we said we were going to leave at 8am and they said they were going to wake up at 10am. So in a totally classic he-said-she-said mixer upper snafu Leo and Pat woke up early expecting to leave with us at 8 and the three of us woke up late expecting to have to wait up for them! Big oops - but we all had the continental breakfast with some ...

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 1...

Some people find that waking up to birds is a very peaceful activity, so much so that it’s even one of the alarm choices on an iPhone. Those people obviously haven’t been in Jordan, MT at 4:20 AM when it seems like several thousand birds all started screeching their heads off. Not peaceful at all, but anyways it’s Brian with Day 24 of the trip, or as I like to call it, two days out from leaving Montana. I eventually got back to sleep after the birds woke me up earlier and started getting ready for the day around 7. The birds were still screeching but it was semi tolerable at this point (though there were owls hooing in the daylight which is lending more credit to the theory that this is all a simulation) and I packed up all my gear and ate my oatmeal breakfast. Just as we were leaving I found that the birds had sensed my annoyance at them and had pooped all over my left handlebar (as I’m typing this Dustin just found out that a bird pooped on his tent as well…we are being targeted) so ...

I woke up once again gasping for water… I reached over for my phone and saw that it was 1:30 am… luckily I had the foresight to buy a poweraid earlier in the night and chugged the whole thing (more like a happy accident but nevertheless the best way to prevent a hangover). All this because instead of a rest day today we made yesterday evening our rest day and polished off 40 beers between the 5 of us - college. Anyway, shortly after chugging the poweraid, I heard some scratching outside the tent - so naturally I panicked - took the safety off my bear spray (what a thrill) and proceeded to look up current grizzly territory in Montana (knowing full well we weren’t in it anymore, but hey paranoia is bitch). Finally, after worrying about being on the edge of grizzly territory where there hasn’t been a sighting in 20+ years for 2 hours I fell back asleep till 7.  So we all slowly got up and tried to get some breakfast at the truck stop that we were staying behind because the clerk last ...