Month: June 2022

Heads up that for some folks this is going to be like that chapter in Moby Dick about knots. Like, “okay, why did we need to know that? And can we get on with plot movement?” And it’s a long post! But I’m including snacks here for more general interest; skip to the end if you came for the snacks. This is not intended to be a comprehensive run-down of my tour set-up; no one wants that. But I have Thoughts and Opinions on some of my equipment and choices that might be of interest.

Tires: I already knew I was lucky to have a bike mechanic as one of my closest friends, and Steve has always set me up right. But I have never been more grateful to have such a knowledgeable buddy than when I hear about all the flats other touring folks are getting on these glass-strewn shoulders. Many folks were sold the wrong tires for the job (gravel tires look knobby and tough!), but when Steve York in Sandpoint looked over my bike he nodded approvingly at my Schwalbe Marathons and pronounced me in good shape. I know I’ll get a flat eventually, but I’m beating the average by a lot.

Padding: I have given it up entirely and am, so far, thrilled with the change. Joyce announced on Circle Tour last summer—brashly, I thought—that padding is for people who don’t ride bikes. We’d both stopped using gloves, which didn’t seem to do much and sometimes made my hands hurt more. But Joyce had been experimenting with unpadded shorts and was not having (more than normal) butt problems. And padding takes up a lot of space and longer to dry! So I tried unpadded shorts for my longer rides over the fall and spring and was confident enough that I was into it to bring two pairs of unpadded and only one pair of padded shorts this tour. (It helps that it’s nearly impossible to find decent women’s cycling shorts. Do better, bike apparel manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.) Waistbands matter a lot to me—you’re leaning all the time—and I ultimately went with yoga shorts, Athleta’s 7” Stash shorts. I gotta say they’ve been kind of a dream. The legs ride up, but that’s true even with bike shorts that have that sticky stuff, especially as your legs change shape over the course of tour. And the inseams may not hold up the whole 11 weeks—they’re pilling and fraying a bit from the saddle. But I can’t blame them for that: this wasn’t what they signed up for. They’re so comfy, dry relatively quickly, don’t feel like diapers, and even with the hot days I have not had any butt problems. I ordered two additional pairs for Andrew to bring me when we meet up in Michigan, and I’ll send home the padded pair I brought and maybe swap out the old ones for the new. I’m really only using two pairs right now: I wash one each night and wear the other, but it only takes one day of not being able to dry them to wish for a third pair, so I’m going to hold onto them for now. As of a year or two ago I go commando; no seams is the name of the game.

Bear vault: Though some folks on the Adventure Cycle forum counseled against a bear vault, I am cautious by nature and decided to bring one anyway. It was kind of a pain to lug around bungeed to my pannier, and I admit I remain unsure whether it was worthwhile. It certainly gave me peace of mind a couple of times, but nearly every campground I stayed at in bear country had its own bear-proof food storage container. If the Midwest turns out to be as raccoon-infested as that one year they ate a hole through the tent, I may ask Andrew to bring it back, but otherwise I’m good with leaving my food in my panniers outside the tent.

Insulated water bottles: I mean, I guess, okay, if it’s not really hot. But they don’t do you much good after 80 degrees, when you care most about cold water. I’d say at most have one, and put your cold stuff in it and drink that one first. No point in saving it for when it’s warm. I’m still annoyed at myself for letting the guy at REI persuade me it was worthwhile when I knew better from my own experience.

Devices: I have two devices. One is a Wahoo ELMNT for navigation, mileage, elevation, and the like. After some initial glitches with the navigation in Seattle, which Wahoo customer service did a nice job of helping with, it’s been pretty great. The companion app is a terrific interface, and with some work at the front end creating cue sheets for the ACA routes in RideWithGPS (the ACA GPX data sets do not come with cues, and the service point data are not compatible with the Wahoo), it’s been so easy to use the routes. The nav does get a little confused by tricky turns (me too, device), but I have both my own eyes and a paper map as back-up.

The second device is a Garmin InReach mini. It serves as back-up communication when I don’t have cell service; I preset messages before leaving so I can send Andrew romantic nothings like “Arrived at camp, but no service. Xoxoxo.” It is also an emergency SOS. But most importantly so far, with the monthly subscription service it is a tracking device. I put on tracking each morning before I leave, and Andrew can watch my progress on a map via pings it sends out every 10 minutes. He showed me how he can tell when I’m climbing because the dots get real close together, and then when I descend they start spacing out again. It also means if I don’t have service he can still see that I’m moving and okay.

Safety vest: Joyce and I have never used them, but I had been considering whether I should when Steve last-minute asked if I had one and then dropped his off at my house the day before I left. 🧡💛🧡 I feel like a total dork in it, but I also don’t know if I’ll tour without one again. I feel like a much more visible dork, which is a good thing in this case.

Water bottles: I have four, with a two-liter Platypus bladder for back-up. I have gotten through three before refill possibilities, and it’s only going to get hotter and less populated, so I will likely start strapping on a Gatorade bottle or filling the bladder when I get to ND.

Snacks. Okay, I’m ready to talk about snacks. They are, despite a lot of mouth noises I made before departing about needing real meals, mostly what I eat. Without Joyce making coffee and staying in a lot of motels the last week or so, I don’t bother heating water in the morning, so I tend to eat a bar of some sort. I’ll have lunch at Subway if I happen on one at the right time or at a bar & grill if I arrive to a motel night town early, and then I usually won’t bother with dinner. But I want to be clear: I am eating CONSTANTLY. On my bike, standing next to my bike, huddled in the shade of my bike … I am always eating. It’s dreamy.

There are several categories of snack, and I think it’s important to have at least two of each kind in my trunk rack bag—which is 80% snacks—all the time.

First is the sour chewy type. The form has to lend itself to being eaten on the roll, so strings and tiny pieces usually aren’t ideal. My main selections in this category include sour strips, chewy Sweet Tarts, sour gummy bears, any of a variety of single flavors/shapes of sour gummy (worm, coke bottle, etc.). I am usually eating these while riding; one often lives in my bar bag.

Then there’s the savory carby snack. You know what I’m talking about: Cheez-Its (white cheddar, hot & spicy) and Snyder’s pretzel bits (Hot Buffalo wing) are the leaders in this category. I also like the occasional fun flavor of Chex Mix, but it’s gotta be something that can be eaten crushed.

Chocolate/rich/fatty snacks: So much good stuff here. Caramel M&Ms (share size my ass), Rollos, Cow Tales, occasionally Reese’s products (mainly for eating with bananas) … this is kind of a new category for me, so I’m still exploring. I would put energy bars in this category; though they’re not as tasty as candy, they’re nuts and chocolate and sugar. Same with those two-packs of Pop Tarts. A new addition this trip is the salted peanut roll, which I bought because it looked interesting and then kicked to the bottom of the snack pile for days. Then I was short on fatty snacks one afternoon and ate it reluctantly and discovered I’d been a fool. It’s got caramel! And some kind of vanilla nougat! I have been buying them since. Trail mix also goes in this category, though it’s a good transition item to the last snack category: “real food” items. What is real food on the road? Hard-boiled eggs, cheese sticks/bars (either solo or wrapped in/accompanied by a meat), pickled carrots or green beans, yogurt, apples, bananas. These are usually the hardest to come by, and I grab them when I see them.

You asked about snacks, and I have answered the call and then some! When you’re passionate and knowledgeable about a topic, the words just come, I guess.

I rolled over at 4:30, grabbed for my phone, and looked at the weather. It was still promising high winds from the west and no rain. Need I say that made me happy? This meant I could take my time getting out of the motel, so I did just that, dallying until about 6:30, when I hit the gas station, stocked up on snacks, and was on the road.

The mornings are getting warmer—today it was 55 when I woke up—as I very slowly descend toward sea level. I climb a fair amount each day—it rocks and rolls to the tune of 1200 feet of climbing the two days after Cut Bank and 3000 feet that awful day known as yesterday—but I’m always losing a little more elevation than I gained. Glasgow is around 2100 feet.

I knew going into the day that Saco, MT is the mosquito capital of the world; I’d read about it on some of the blogs of other NT riders during my research. Yet somehow I failed to remember—despite reminding myself before I went to bed—to leave the bug spray out of the panniers when I packed. Or to put bug spray on! Oy gevalt.

This meant I rode the first 26 miles to Saco proper without stopping. Every time I tried, they swarmed me. Every hill I climbed where I dropped below 8-9 mph they swarmed me. And once they latched on they could withstand a fair amount of wind (“aggressive,” a lady in the gas station called them); I slapped three off my calf at 15 mph. It rained a few times, both some sprinkles and a few minutes of big fat splatty drops, which I didn’t mind because it was warm and would turn sunny again just a few minutes later. But this was me passing through the weather, not the weather passing over me. My alleged tailwind was nowhere to be seen, the alfalfa treacherously still (though ever richly sweet!), even as the morning went on.

I stopped briefly in Saco itself, which maybe sprays or something, because I was able to eat a snack and escape a few minutes of surprisingly chilly rain on a bench under the extended roof of the closed library.

Saco consisted of a small grocery store, the aforementioned library, and a defunct motel. A man in front of the grocery store asked if I had experienced some mosquitos, and I owned that I had, and he asked—proudly—if I was aware that Saco was the mosquito capital of the world. He seemed a bit chagrined when I said I’d read as much.

Perhaps because I didn’t get bitten, perhaps because I was still chilly and wet, I once again neglected to get the bug spray out of the pannier. It wasn’t until 14 speedy miles later in Hinsdale (small gas station/convenience store), where I bought some pickled carrots (!!) and Nerds and used the bathroom, that I saw their bug spray display and thought to ask the cashier how much further east this went on. HOW MUCH MORE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. She said it got better by Glasgow, where I am sleeping tonight, so I went outside and put on my damn bug spray. And it was better. DEET is magic potion, y’all.

And my tailwind kicked up, and that was grand. I was making such good time I stopped at a random rest area 16 miles from Glasgow to kick back, eat a snack, and let the wind pick up further to carry me into town.

While I was there a guy named Chris—clearly also a cyclist, since he noted the tailwind that was heating up—started chatting with me about my trip. He and his lovely family were driving from PA to Glacier, and after we talked for a while they kindly invited me to join them for lunch. I had avocado! And hummus and cucumbers and CSA carrots they’d brought from home. Heaven. They were a delight and asked all sorts of questions: it was fun to talk about the trip with folks who didn’t warn me about the dangers or shake their heads at my foolishness.

The last 15 miles into Glasgow turned out to be southeast, so I didn’t get the full tailwind advantage I believed I had earned, but as we all know, the weather don’t care. I am once again moteling it—it’s too hard to persuade myself to set up camp in near-90-degree full sun. Once I’m in the Midwest I hope to return to more camping, but for the moment I’m comfortable with motel life.

Today was so hard. I think it was the hardest day of riding I’ve ever done.

Knowing I had a long day ahead, I set out just after 5:30 to try and get in as many miles as possible before the wind and heat got going for real. I sunscreened up before leaving, figuring I’d ride straight through the first 30 miles. Which I did. The first 20 were grand: cool, windless, and green. Trees reappeared east of Havre, not just as a carefully maintained windbreak (never quite reaching the road, because why would you waste water shading the road?), but as an apparently natural feature as well. I also saw a bit more water in the form of creeks and rivers, the Milk River being the only one with something like a current. The Bear Paw mountain range runs just south of Havre, and I have come up with a theory that mountains = runoff = trees. Anyone out there who can confirm or deny?

But in all cases, this meant shade opportunities, and I took one at my 30-mile break. By 8 a.m. the wind had kicked up for real, and the last 10 miles of that stretch were work. I didn’t know the half of it. There are nearly no pictures from today after the morning because I was too busy being miserable from riding into 70 miles of intense, face-blasting, ear-whistling headwind. There was not a mile of that ride I enjoyed, I kid you not. The one pleasure of the day was (were? mom?) the clouds of alfalfa in all different shades of purple lining the road, giving off the sweetest scent in the heat. That and the white and yellow sweet clover and a lovely grass called squirreltail made some moments tolerable.

This historic marker expresses as clearly as the bullet marks on the Lewis & Clark monument the present rage and pain of the Blackfeet. It made my heart hurt, as it should.

The wind was like this at noon and more later when I was too drained to stop for more video.

I yelled at the wind, but couldn’t hear myself because it just tore the words from my mouth. I would have given up if I could: taken the first ride offered, stayed somewhere closer, laid down at the side of the road. I tried to get a room at an alleged B&B in a town 17 miles short of Malta called Dodson, but the town turned out to be dead, and the lady never called me back, and I had to keep going. On the record: Joyce, you are correct that headwinds are worse than mountains.

Brief comic interlude as I arrived at the edge of town.

After 14 hours on the road and 3000 feet of up and down—my second-slowest day at just above 8 mph average—I landed at the Edgewater Inn & RV Park and opted for the inn portion. Too tired to consider dinner, I drank an ice-cold soda, showered, texted with Andrew, confirmed that tomorrow is supposed to be all tailwinds all day, and went to bed.

I do have this closing thought. One of the printable things I shouted at the wind (definitely a good cliche about wasting energy) was “THIS IS TOO HARD!” But exhausted and with a bod aching from pushing through strong resistance all day, I can sit with the fact that it *wasn’t* too hard. I did it.

Today it got real hot for the first time. It was 47 when I woke up, but by 9 everything I’d hand-washed in the sink that morning was fully dry. This is my last day of being fooled into wearing leggings, only to have to stop by the side of the road and take them off an hour later. I’m in hilly plains right now, which means rolling terrain and no shade.

Leaving Chester I made sure I was stocked with water and snacks; there didn’t look to be much at all until Havre. (Did I ever mention that when I picked up my bike by the ranger station in Glacier after my hike, the ranger told me she was impressed with my water set-up? Four water bottles, baby! Joyce knows why.) So when the first town, Inverness, popped up advertising a place of commerce, I decided to turn off and take a try on refilling my one empty. This turned out to be a brilliant decision, because one of the place’s two businesses was a post office. (The other was the tire shop/auto parts store where I bought water and used the bathroom.) I was now out of bear country, but I’d been in Cut Bank on Sunday and left Chester before business hours, so I was still hauling around the bear vault and bear spray, the former being lousy for aerodynamics in wind country. The post office was open for full service (kind of a miracle to me—Joyce and I have seen so many post offices that have window hours maybe half a day a week), and the sweet woman working there dug up a used box in back for me to send the items (and my second map!) home in. She also told me she’d heard the rioting had destroyed Portland’s and Seattle’s beautiful downtown areas, and I assured her that Seattle was lovely as ever during my recent visit.

Less burdened, I rolled on through the morning passing many towns and former towns of varying degrees of funct-ness: Joplin (actually came before Inverness, but no commerce), Rudyard, Hingham (yay Spencer’s Bar & Grill!), Gildford, Kremlin. Maintaining proper hydration becomes a real balancing game on a reasonably trafficked road with no commerce and no trees. There were no bathroom opportunities between Hingham and Havre, 35 miles.

When I first left Glacier, and the land turned to grasses, I saw a few enormous industrial farms, with huge, freestanding grain silos towering over endless miles of fields. But as I’ve moved east the farms have gotten smaller and more human-sized, and the grain elevators and railroad stop are in town, with the town clustered around them. You can always tell when a town is coming because there’ll be a line of trees (wind break!) on the horizon and the shiny metal cylinders of grain storage. I haven’t yet seen any water towers yet.

Okay, a weird thing. I mentioned yesterday that going off-book was unnerving, but I’d still been running my ride on the nav device, and I could see the roads on the device map. Well, as soon as I entered Liberty County, the maps stopped. Suddenly my ride was floating in nothingness, the space of the plains, and it was creepy. I entertained various theories about why this might have happened (did they refuse to turn in their maps!?) and whether my map world would ever be restored. The second mystery was resolved with my departure from Liberty and entry into Hill County.

Sometimes the shoulder was like this:

And sometimes the road was like this:

The lack of shade was real. I spent one rest break with my bike leaned against a mile marker, squeezed into the short midday shadow of my panniers. There’s a lot of midday when the sun rises at 5:15 and sets at 9:15.

And then I was in Havre, whose county fairground where I’d planned to camp looked like a scorched airfield in the 92-degree sun, so I moved on to the cheapest motel in town, the charmingly dated Siesta Motel, and got Mexican for dinner (!) and wandered the town’s historic district.

I woke up to 40 degrees and icy condensation covering my tent and everything else. I packed up what I could and laid the tent parts out to get as much early-morning sun as possible. I’m learning quickly that it starts cold in the morning, but the sun comes up quick and full. While waiting for things to dry, I took a quick look at the map and discovered that I’d forgotten I was using an alternate route through most of the rest of Montana, an older version of the ACA route that they’d changed several years back due to increased traffic. I’d asked about it on an ACA forum and been advised the older route was better this summer due to construction on the new one. And I’d planned it that way and then just forgot. Unnerving as it felt to be getting off book—it’s so easy to just follow the device’s cues!—the truth is that it’s 2 East through Wolf Point, most of the rest of Montana. No cues, no turns: just 2 East for days. (I didn’t remember until later that day that I’d ordered and have with me a free an excellent Montana biking map that gave lots of useful information about road conditions.) So I took a deep breath and set off without external navigation, but with my railroad companion.

My first (and only) town of the day was Shelby, a town with more signs announcing its name than I’ve seen previously—three before we were even in the town proper.

The town still had some terrific buildings standing from its heyday.

I learned more about the town’s history from this marker, which I found delightful and dryly hilarious.

Outside town, that was followed by this related, but far grimmer, marker about the wretchedness of colonization. The tone was severe, and the graffiti drove the point home.

The land rolled on like this.

And like this.

I’m still seeing lots of white crosses, though the landscape is far less dramatic, with fewer drop-offs and blind curves and other features that would make driving hazardous. There are so few features, in fact, that I took one of my breaks a mile early because I happened on a wholly unexpected and much appreciated guardrail against which I could lean my bike and my back. It was the only one I saw all day.

The railroad is usually nearby, but when the going gets tough it wanders off to do its own thing for a while, rejoining me when the road has calmed down a bit. Faithless.

I arrived in Chester earlier than planned—crosswinds and hills notwithstanding, my average mph has increased to 10-11 from the 7-9 I was doing in the mountains. Also, the lack of shade makes prolonged stops less desirable.

I stayed at the less-than-charming MX Motel, but made up for it with Modelo on tap and a frozen pizza (the kitchen was closed, sad face) at The Grand Bar & Grill, where I chatted with the bartender—NY-born, CA-raised, MT-adopted—and the other patrons and had a good old time. Back to the motel for a call with Andrew ❤️ and bed.

To those asking about snacks! I have a lengthy disquisition on snacks and gear mostly composed in my head, but I haven’t yet put clumsy fingers to screen on it. I’m guessing the heat is going to drive me to more motel stays through the plains, so hopefully a good night of free wifi and a comfortable place to hang will allow me to bring it to written fruition. Thank you for caring! I have much to say on the topic.