Day One Hundred Ninety-eight, Date Monday, September 14, 2009
Time in Saddle: 8:11
Distance for the Day: 77.04 miles From Regent To Rhame, ND
Accumulated Trip Distance: 9884.1 miles
Altitudes: Starting/Ending: 2326’/2998’, Highest: 3017’ Accumulated: 2149’
Speeds: Avg: 9.4 mph, Max: 24.2 mph
Weather: 70° temperate, windy, clear
Expenditures: $17
Woke up at 6:07, got up at 6:35am to clear skies (with some clouds around the horizon) and beautiful Venus; ready to roll by 7:13am. It was very windy all night, and that kept me up a little, blowing my tent around. There were mosquitoes – I got hit three times in the legs before putting on my rain gear. I went to the local mini mart at 7:30am for a breakfast croissant, choco milk, Danish, and cookie + a soda for the road ($15). Very surprisingly, for this small one-dog town, they had wi-fi, so I checked and handled email, weather, and posted a blog I’d forgotten to enter (#177) (thanks for bringing it to my atte
ntion, M!) I had to append it to #176 to keep it somewhat chronological. I then took off to continue on to Scranton at 9:45am. It’s a somewhat long haul, almost 50 miles, from Regent to Scranton, so I stocked up a little extra on drinks.
Time in Saddle: 8:11
Distance for the Day: 77.04 miles From Regent To Rhame, ND
Accumulated Trip Distance: 9884.1 miles
Altitudes: Starting/Ending: 2326’/2998’, Highest: 3017’ Accumulated: 2149’
Speeds: Avg: 9.4 mph, Max: 24.2 mph
Weather: 70° temperate, windy, clear
Expenditures: $17
Woke up at 6:07, got up at 6:35am to clear skies (with some clouds around the horizon) and beautiful Venus; ready to roll by 7:13am. It was very windy all night, and that kept me up a little, blowing my tent around. There were mosquitoes – I got hit three times in the legs before putting on my rain gear. I went to the local mini mart at 7:30am for a breakfast croissant, choco milk, Danish, and cookie + a soda for the road ($15). Very surprisingly, for this small one-dog town, they had wi-fi, so I checked and handled email, weather, and posted a blog I’d forgotten to enter (#177) (thanks for bringing it to my atte
ntion, M!) I had to append it to #176 to keep it somewhat chronological. I then took off to continue on to Scranton at 9:45am. It’s a somewhat long haul, almost 50 miles, from Regent to Scranton, so I stocked up a little extra on drinks.I was able to go 28 miles before my right knee started hurting at 1:30pm. At 2pm it got worse, so at 2:15 I took a rest break – I thought I’d try to keep an eye on the pain pattern, to see if there was anything I could do to resolve it. There are a LOT of insects in this part of North Dakota – amongst the fields of hay, corn, barley, several times a minute I would have to swipe gnats away from my goggles, and occasionally they’d get inside my goggles, so I’d have to take them off and poke them out with my finger. I stopped in Scranton from 4-4:30pm to stock up on liquids and food items ($8), and continued on towards Baker. A few notes: the roads overall in ND have been great, except for two 10 mile stretches of dirt gravel. They don’t have much shoulder, but they’re so lightly traveled, it wasn’t a problem; gazillions of
grasshoppers that jump up and hit me in the face, chest, arms, or under my legs; I think I’ve discovered a way to fix my painful knee syndrome – just hit a level or downhill segment of road (or even stop), and push my heels forward and lock my knees to the fully extended position and stretch ‘em for a couple of moments several times, the pain goes away for quite a while, and if I do this every now and then, the pain never gets a chance to start – cool! I’m slowly gaining altitude as I continue south and west. I reached the town of Rhame near sunset, and looked around for services, but there was just a bar with a soda machine outside, so I got soda ($2) and found a patch of lawn behind the firehouse (N46 14.009’ W103 39.228’) that was pretty concealed, so set up my tent, cloaked my trike, and was in bed by 8:30pm, munching and reading until it got too dark to read, at about 9pm. I went to sleep, but at 11pm they let loose the “town horn!” I just happened to be at ground zero (it was on a pole above the firehouse), and was so loud, I clapped my hands over my ears and went into a fetal position for almost a minute, before it slowly wound back down. Yeesh! Then, at 5am, a train came rumbling through with horn a-blast. I was about 200 yards from the tracks, so of course, it woke me up, but not like that town horn!
grasshoppers that jump up and hit me in the face, chest, arms, or under my legs; I think I’ve discovered a way to fix my painful knee syndrome – just hit a level or downhill segment of road (or even stop), and push my heels forward and lock my knees to the fully extended position and stretch ‘em for a couple of moments several times, the pain goes away for quite a while, and if I do this every now and then, the pain never gets a chance to start – cool! I’m slowly gaining altitude as I continue south and west. I reached the town of Rhame near sunset, and looked around for services, but there was just a bar with a soda machine outside, so I got soda ($2) and found a patch of lawn behind the firehouse (N46 14.009’ W103 39.228’) that was pretty concealed, so set up my tent, cloaked my trike, and was in bed by 8:30pm, munching and reading until it got too dark to read, at about 9pm. I went to sleep, but at 11pm they let loose the “town horn!” I just happened to be at ground zero (it was on a pole above the firehouse), and was so loud, I clapped my hands over my ears and went into a fetal position for almost a minute, before it slowly wound back down. Yeesh! Then, at 5am, a train came rumbling through with horn a-blast. I was about 200 yards from the tracks, so of course, it woke me up, but not like that town horn!
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