53.37 mi 36.0 max 4:06.38 avg. 13.0 mph
Today's ride felt really short. There was really only one hill, coming out of Billings (that's the city behind me in the picture) Compared to some of the rides we've been doing...90-100 miles...53 miles DOES kind of seem like an inordinately short day. One cool thing was that we got to ride through a construction site - the cars were all detoured around the bridge, so there was a bit of time where we could ride side by side and the staff couldn't really say anything to us because a) there were no cars which meant that b) the staff couldn't really follow us. Except for Paula, who was (incidentally) riding next to me.
Everyone was onto the field at Hardin by 12:30 or so. Good thing, because we quickly discovered how happening a place Hardin actually is. There are several fast food joints, a handful of gas station/casinos and a couple of cheap motels, and, uhh, that's about it. Brian, Sean, and I biked the extra half mile to the Dairy Queen in the center of town...the bonus mile was worth the well-deserved Blizzard (DQ has nothing on Bart's though!!!!)
About twenty people commandeered a bus from the senior center and took it to the Battle of Little Bighorn (they couldn't stand the thought of an entire afternoon in exciting Hardin, MT). Apparently, the tour bus was hot and many of the would-be historians suffered an acute case of narcolepsy. I opted to pretend it was summer vacation, so I hung around the house (tent) doing nothing (yup, nothing). Actually, that's not ENTIRELY true...I watched Alan as he swore at my rear wheel while rebuilding it. He said that there was some rust that had built up in my freewheel, and that it might make some noise as it works its way out. I'm just hoping that when I go up hills tomorrow it's not like I'm dragging an elephant.
Deb's been having a really hard time sleeping, between the tenting thing and the train tracks that we are always sleeping next to, so she decided to get a motel room for a night. She invited both Brian and me over to her luxurious accomodations...which included a pool with a water slide. The water slide was THE BEST! Our safety manager, Britney Spears, snapped her gum at the top of the ladder and gave us the go-ahead when it was safe to descend the chute. When she dropped her glass bottle of ice tea on the pavement below, she suggested that we might avoid walking near the broken glass...the young boy with the pair of spitting crocodile eyes who was playing in the pool at the same time as we were managed to pick up several shards in his foot, despite her words of caution.
We discovered that the fastest way to go down was lying on our backs, and the most terrifying way was to go on our backs with our eyes closed. The water slide totally gets five stars. And the rain storm that came in on us while we were in the pool was pretty intense too!
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