A.) that the KOA campground was defunct, the land taken over by a big new motel;
B.) that the city park might or might not allow camping;
C.) that the state park had camping, but did not offer showers, and it was on the wrong end of town for our purposes; and,
D.) the Green Valley RV Park had showers.
We opted for Green Valley. We should have gone to the state park. Green Valley RV Park caters not to tourists and recreational RVers so much as people who live in trailers while locally employed. In other words, it's not really a campground. It was loud and too close to the interstate and not far enough from the work crew that was putting in late hours repairing the railroad tracks.
Our near neighbors had a little campfire beer fest going and some of the revelers parked a truck what seemed like inches from our tent.
When the festivities eventually subsided we were able to drowse off but we were awakened several times by the squeaking door of the trailer being opened and one of its occupants coming out to hork up and noisily expectorate apparently huge globs of snot.
But we survived. And we did get showers.
We stopped for lunch in Wibaux, the last town in Montana. A local "gentleman" (as the chatty clerk at the little grocery store described him) has decorated the town with a number of large metal folk sculptures. I posed my bike next to one by the grocery store. We ate lunch beside another in the city park.
Soon after Wibaux we finally left Montana behind and entered North Dakota. We biked along the wide shoulder of I-94 through otherworldly landscapes and striated badlands. The wind favored us.
Riding the interstate was not so unpleasant as you might imagine. Traffic volumes are low and motorists polite. Semis and RVs even gave us a friendly toot of the horn and a wave.
At the edge of Medora we stopped at Chimney Park, the site of the old De Mores Beef Packing Plant (destroyed by fire in 1907). I called my nephew, Nathan. He was in the car, showing the sights to his visiting in-laws, Larry and Nancy. He said he would be in Medora in about a half hour. So we stopped at a side-street coffee shop for Scotcheroos and espresso. We sat on the porch and chatted with Doug, one of Medora's 60 residents and 37 registered voters.
Many of Medora's shops have "Closed for the Season" signs in their windows.
After coffee with Doug, we went to the Medora Convenience Store to buy a few groceries. By chance Nathan, Nancy, and Larry were just pulling in as we arrived. Nathan was kind enough to transport our groceries out to Badlands Ministries Bible Camp where we are spending the night.
If there is any disappointment to this day it is that I didn't get to see Nathan's wife, Emily.
Hilly is too mild an adjective to describe the road back to the camp. BJ shifted to his smallest chainring and threw the chain into the space between the crankset and the bottom bracket of his bike, a condition cyclists call "chainsuck." It took a while to get rolling again. When we did, the road turned to gravel.
It wasn't easy to get to camp but it was worth the effort. The place is beautiful and the facility we are staying in luxurious.
We rode 74 miles today for a trip total of 1299.
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| Wibaux Bike Sculpture |
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| Another Wibaux Sculpture |
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| Over Half the way home! |
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| Chimney Park |
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