Vacation, Day 2: North Dakota to Montana

Grandma's 95th birthday wasn't until August 8, so we spent our first night not so far away in Belfield, North Dakota. I was feeling pretty ramped up in the morning, the start of a two week vacation and all, so I got up bright and early, just after sunrise, and headed out of the hotel on my bike to take the interstate to Medora. You heard that right, the interstate. I biked on I-94 between Belfield and Medora. My brother had told me this was the only road, although a subsequent inspection of Google maps tells me otherwise. I did do some web research first to see if I could pedal the interstate, and the answer was an absolute yes, although the information was incredibly sparse. I have this suspicion that very few people are willing to admit you can ride on the interstate because they think it's so stupid. For those of you who doubt, I refer you to the Federal Highway Administration, which doesn't tell you which states allow riding on the highway, but does assure you that if there isn't a big sign that says "no bicycles" (e.g. Minnesota), you're pretty much safe...perhaps allowed is a better word...to ride the big tar.

Despite everyone telling you you're pretty much a meat waffle (c'mon...name the movie!), it's not that bad. Wide shoulders, and if you go just after sun up, with the sun behind you so the drivers aren't blinded, you can be fairly assured a.) they've sobered up since 2 or 3 a.m., b.) they can see you because the sun isn't in their eyes, c.) they have to go really out of their way to cross over six feet of shoulder, and d.) you can hear them coming and get out of the way because in ND there's only about one car every 5-10 minutes at that time of the morning. It was absolutely gorgeous, fairly quiet, and a cool 65-70 in the sun-is-only-now-coming-up liminal. (flickr album).

I did slightly slower than the speed limit. Not because 75 is really fast for a bike, but because I was checking out the prairie dog town on the way into Medora.

I stopped at the first rest stop. Most of the people there had horses. I had an iron horse. Or a steel horse. Ooooo....it's all the same. Only the scenery changes. Every day. It seems like we're wasting away. Another place, where the roads they are so cold. I'd pedal all night, just to get back hom. On a steel horse I ride. I'm wanted. Dead or alive. Dead....or...alive! That's for Julie.

The wide version. Pretty cool if you click through. I like the bend I got in the panorama.

Proof I was at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Home of buffalo, snakes, and bicyclists!

I was going to go over here, and then it started crying.

I didn't see any wildlife. I'm glad. I hear they're bike thieves.

The wide angle without the bicycle, in case you're a bigot.

The womenfolk followed in my steps, three hours later. Eryn bought the dragon she's holding, "Puff", at the hotel in Belfield. She's still sleeping with it, despite grandma Ellen and Grandpa John giving her $100 to spend on vacation as she pleased, which was split evenly between stuffed animals and little golden guides (spiders, stars, minerals and more). We got an agreement earlier on that we could get rid of almost as many animals as she purchased during the trip.

A great picture of Eryn in North Dakota, home of dragons.

When I got to Medora, I ate breakfast at the Cowboy Cafe. Delicious. The smell of bacon and hashbrowns wafted into the street. There was a line by the time I ate and space was limited, so I offered to share my table with the three women in line behind me so I wasn't taking up space for four by myself. One of them was from the Twin Cities, but had brothers running the sheet metal shop in Sidney, Montana, which was where I was headed. We talked vacations, oil wells, housing booms, housing busts, and had a pretty good time sitting together.

Pooteewheet and Eryn were still quite a ways off after breakfast, so I decided I'd go look at the Maah Daah Hey mountain bike trail that was supposed to be in the neighborhood. It was outside of town and there was a sign, so I took off. Until that point, I'd ridden mostly long but manageable hills, but the road to the trail was up, up, up, up. Near the top I met a woman coming from the other direction who said, "Hey, the sign up to here said 8% and you made it! I hope you have another gear, because it's 9% from this direction!" Ugh. I headed down the hill anyway and took the dirt road to the Maah Daah Hey. As I was pulling up to the trail sign, I did a rolling dismount, only to have a rattlesnake slither under my tire, then under my foot, and into the weeds. Got my adrenalin going.

I looked at the sign, and it assured me I was an idiot for not watching out for snakes. Despite knowing a rattler was in the grass somewhere, I rolled down the trail to check it out. Some serious sand. I was tired after only half a mile. It would be cool to use Dakota Cyclery to do the trail ride where they drop off your food and water in lock boxes for overnight stays 2 or 3 times. If you had comfortable riding boots that came up to your ankles. Or could change a flat with a rattler embedded in it. Seriously...I'm tempted. I think I'd remember it the rest of my life. If you're a mountain biker and have an interest, let me know and maybe we can plan something a year or two out. I biked back up the 9% hill to town, my bike squeaking in an ominous way. I'll get to that in a later post. It started here.

We headed toward Sidney, with only a brief stop in Glendive to look for petrified wood and check out Glendisaurus, the triceratops who lives in Glendive, Montana (where I have/had relatives).

Here eyes burnt out quite a while ago, but otherwise she's holding up well. The park is a pleasant place to stop, although it felt like 100 in the sun.

Eryn and I inappropriately touching her. Isn't the cloaca somewhere near here?

Vacation, Day 1: North Dakota

If you're a Facebook friend then you've probably seen quite a few of these, although without the commentary. I was too lazy to do a write up there. But here you can get some insight into why I took some of the strange photos I did. The whole set is out in my Vacation 2010 set on Flickr, but I'll try to cover highlights. We went to my grandmother's 95th birthday in Sidney, Montana, for vacation and, as icing on the cake, just kept traveling through Montana to Glacier, then to Idaho and the Hiawatha Bike Trail, and then back through Yellowstone and South Dakota. I can't remember the last time we went on a two week vacation, so it was very different.

This is a bit self explanatory. I asked her to stand there. It's funny. I bet they're using the term to refer to firewood or kindling.

Eryn was obsessed with Spiderman while on vacation. She spent a lot of time under a blanket shielding her portable DVD player from the sun. I didn't realize this was the primary intent behind burkas. We were watching for a copy of Spiderman 2 throughout most of the trip, but the lack of Targets and Best Buys west of Rapid City proved to be a problem. Kmarts and Walmarts weren't cutting it, although we did look. On the way back through Rapid City we finally found Spiderman 3 at the Best Buy and she switched to that for the rest of the ride.

We took our first real stop in Jamestown, North Dakota, to visit the giant buffalo, see the real white buffalo and visit Frontier Village, where I've been going since I was a kid.


Either I missed some exhibits before, or they've been adding. This is a pretty nice TRS-80, although it paled next to the calculator collection. They may not be part of the Old West frontier, but they're part of the computer frontier. I bet that was the logic involved.

I'm still valid to marry people in Minnesota, but I have no abilities to marry a mother and her daughter in North Dakota. I couldn't have even married the fugitive cousins who were headed to Canada via all our stops. My rights stop at the border. CAN I HEAR A YEA!

yea. sure.

DO YOU FEEL THE SPIRIT?!

sure dad. whatever hon.

ARE YOU MOVED TO REPENT!?

can you repent going on vacation with you? what's repent, dad?

I like bike art, even when it's sort of cheesy. I just won't buy it if it's cheesy.

I didn't remember the law office and doll house (a strong and) from the last time we were there in 2005. I could have taken this picture without ever leaving work. I was primarily interested in the remote possibility that Eliza Dushku was hidden down the boardwalk dressed in a sexy lawyer outfit.

But the dolls in the dollhouse looked nothing like Eliza Dushku. Boo! BOO!

Can you hear it singing to you?

Dolly dolly rocking lightly

Dolly dolly rocking nightly

Dolly dolly softly sweet

Dolly dolly kill you really dead.

I don't know what the hell was going on with these two. I considered that it might be racist, but that didn't seem to make any sense. Despite flat head infants being on the rise, it just occurred to me that maybe he'd once had a colored cap that's since lost its shine. Or, maybe he's Basketcase. What's in the basket little dude with sort of normal head.

my brother...

Part of the Old West Frontier was the fact that we had 50 states. And lesbian bartenders.

Eryn and I took this picture five years ago and it was great. Pooteewheet and her took it this time and it's great. Big smiles. What's that hand?

Eryn was a little big for the horse. What Pooteewheet failed to capture was when the horse had to relieve itself and, because Eryn was heavy, spread its back legs very slowly, staggering into the splits until it was almost whang to ground, and then let loose a nice stream.

This horse thought Eryn was very funny.

Mrs. Klund, what is this dentist doing? Do the dentists of Jamestown practice good dentistry? Will you do this if I come to you to get my teeth checked? Is it dangerous? Does it vibrate?

You'll have to click into this one if you want to see it. Way back there is the giant buffalo. Even further back is the white buffalo (live), but you can't see him. Pooteewheet managed to spot him when we were trying to pat the fake buffalo on the belly.

Holy buffalo balls, Batman! Pooteewheet is all GQ. If girls can be GQ. I wish I had thought to use c:geo to look for caches here, but that didn't occur to me until we were almost fully round trip and in Wyoming. There's probably one under a hoof.

After Jamestown, we hit Salem, North Dakota, to see a real cow, not a bison. This is me, milking Sue. Last time we visited Sue Eryn had a total screaming meltdown (she was two, it was late). She was better natured this time, although perhaps she'd have been a bit more ornery if she'd known the amount of exercise ahead of her in the next two weeks.

Eryn and Pooteewheet on Sue.

I particularly like this one as it looks like Sue is singing into an appropriately sized microphone.

I like cows
And they like me
I like cows
Just wait and see

When they go 'moo'
Hey, move over!
Oh yeah!
Uh uh uh

Well, I like cows
I like to watch them eat
I like cows
They don't move when they eat
And I'm a lone cowhand
From Rio Grande

I like cows
They've got skinny feet
Unlike their friends, the shaved sheep
They've got skinny feet (Cows, by the Suburbs)

Paul Bunyan Trail

I know I have 2 weeks of vacation photos I haven't commented on or posted yet. We'll get to those. I've been busy renaming, pruning, deleting, resizing, and doing all manner of things that precludes actually posting them. But I came back from two weeks of vacation to a short week, only four days, taking off Friday to do a two day bicycle ride on the Paul Bunyan Trail in Northern Minnesota with Ming and Adam.

It was a great trip. We did about 54 miles each the first day, and just 16 or so the second day. Adam did it a bit more evenly as he didn't want anything to do with the 8.5 mile trail cutover that turned out to be a lot of up and down.

The fun started before we even got to Brainerd. We bumped into one of my high school classmates at her new breakfast joint in Elk River. As we were walking to the door I was wondering, out loud, if the place was hers, because I remembered a post from Facebook about her buying a restaurant. Sure enough, she showed up at our table. Later, I had Ming call Adam to verify his address and, while Ming was reading it aloud to me, flipped to the address I'd preprogrammed earlier into the GPS. Ming wanted to know how it had gotten into the GPS so fast. I told him it could recognize an address that was spoken. So he tried to speak his own address into the GPS, then gave up and decided it couldn't account for his accent. I confessed I was yanking his chain.

Ming and Adam at the start of the trail in Brainerd. Very close to two liquor stores, both with a very good selection. I went with the Hop Nest Monster. It was about 85 degrees out, which seems reasonable, but after many hours I had way too much sun. I spent part of yesterday and today battling what I thought was allergies at first, but which may have been a minor sun allergy given the headache, fever and chills, and general redness that never made it to a sun burn.

The big caterpillar that saw us off from the parking lot. I drove off before he/she could hitch a ride on the Focus.

I'm going to blame Ming for the switch to black and white. Here he is at Ye Old Pickle Factory in Nisswa. We didn't actually go in, it was just funny.

Me riding the Nisswa Express. Whoo Whoo!

Ming standing in front of the Pequot bobber.

Pine River. Can you see the geocache? I found four on the trip, most of them in Pine River. Those are Paul Bunyan's shoes in the background, and his footprints in the foreground.

Colonel Cobber. Scary. Looks like it belongs at the Minnesota State Fair. They have a butcher in Backus that Ming and Adam stopped at for beef jerky. It made for a good dinner that night.

No riding on the sidewalk! In Hackensack, near Sweet's, where we ate lunch/dinner and breakfast.

Paul Bunyan, in Hackensack.

Ming and I in Hackensack. Such a sweet picture. You can see the love in our eyes.

Lucette, Paul Bunyan's wife. This was someone's Eagle Scout project.

After Hackensack, we took the trail north and west, which included 8.5 miles of nasty up and down (at least if you'd been riding for 40 miles already). The signs told you when there was a downhill, but never an uphill. When we got to the end, we looked for a place to pitch a tent, but most of the places told us it would be $54 to $80. To pitch a tent. Seriously. WTF. We finally went back to Hackensack where we found a place with a shower for $21 (with tax) that was just down the road from the theater, where we saw "The Other Guys" (funny at first, so slow later). The campsite was great and the only real noise, other than our neighbors, was the raccoon who showed up in the middle of the night. If you're looking for a place in Hackensack, I recommend Pleasant Pines Resort.

Washers, Dryers, Stoves, Refrigerators!!!

My brother sent me this nice ad from Craigslist that would allow us to find some deals on appliances for the rental properties and wanted to know if my wife could get him the discount.

GREAT DEALS ON APPLIANCES WITH 1 YEAR WARRANTY. PRICES STARTING AS LOW $150!!!!!!!!!
WE OFFER 1 YEAR WARRANTY ON PARTS AND LABOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ASK FOR FREE METRO DELIVERY!!!!!!
10% OFF IF YOU LOVE JESUS!!!!!!!!!!!!
FREE RECYCLING OF YOUR OLD APPLIANCES!!!!!!
SE HABLA ESPANOL!!!!!!!!!!!

Latex

I was walking behind someone on the corporate skyway today and realized they smelled like latex. Like a lot of latex. Like a big latex glove. At least that's what I hope it was. A glove. For your hand.

Pants of Doom

I had a dream. In this dream I possessed the Pants of Doom. Innocuous khakis with the power to destroy the world. Many ninjas were tracking me trying to get the pants, but I was staying one step ahead of them. Until I tried to escape over a tall, mesh fence and threw the khakis ahead of me. They snagged on the top of the fence and nothing I could do would get them loose. Stupid pants of doom.