Food, glorious food

Farewell, Bismarck, who knows if we'll ever end up back there again. We pedaled out of town, only getting mildly lost in the process. At our first break a UPS driver pulled up to say hello and ask what we were up to. His truck had a malfunctioning horn and he wanted to explain that he hadn't intentionally beeped at us as we sat at the side of the highway. "Watch out for brown trucks" he told us as he pulled away (UPS drivers drive brown trucks).

We visited a cafe in the town of New Salem for lunch. It was in a converted old house. The food was great. Mike is now convinced that businesses in old houses are wonderful. We last visited a business in an old house in Rochester, Vermont, when Doon of Green Mountain Bicycles let us use his tools and camp in his backyard. We will be on the lookout for more house-businesses in the future. As we finished up two touring cyclists pulled up. Their names were Tom and Julian and had met on the road. They were heading east and were looking for food. Unfortunately they had stopped for a beer at a bar down the road and now were minutes too late for the cafe, which had shut for the afternoon. I hope they found satisfactory sustenance somewhere else in town because this stretch of North Dakota (or perhaps all of North Dakota...) does not have much going on between towns. Before they left we asked their opinion on an upcoming choice: we could either ride on the freeway for 12 miles or on gravel for 10. They had ridden on the freeway and said it wasn't much fun. We had yet to meet anyone who had taken the gravel option so we decided to roll the dice and give it a go.

The gravel was ok in some places, very soft in others. Neither of us fell over, hooray! I wouldn't describe it as good riding though. We made it across the gravel into the small town of Glen Ullin, named for a fine Scottish whiskey. No, it's not a whiskey. That I know of. I know nothing about whiskey, you'll have to ask my brothers. The town has a small city-owned campground with a random train car in the middle of it. See photos for details. We camped there and were only briefly disturbed by some local youth who came to hang out in the train late at night.

Onto today. Since most of our days, thoughts, and desires revolve around food let me take you on a culinary journey through the small towns of southern North Dakota. First we visited Hebron, population 692. We elected to patronize a coffee shop named "Dark Side of the Brew", which had plenty of Pink Floyd references inside. We enjoyed baked goods and a cup of tea (Earl Grey, sorry Helen Y) because we are civilized people. We chatted with some folks who were visiting from California, mostly about the wild fires.

Next we crossed a timezone into Richardton, population 543. Here we settled on the local grocery store for lunch, bypassing the local cafe with the (probably accurate) assumption that they would have little to offer vegetarians. We were pleasantly surprised at the size of the store and happy to find a deli counter offering a few cooked sides that we pieced together into a meal.

Cue another 20 miles of riding before we entered the not-so-small town of Dickinson, population 22993. Mike picked up his new jersey from the post office while I googled where to get smoothies from. He looks very dashing in the new jersey but you'll have to wait for photos until the next blog post. We pedaled a block to a coffee shop operated out of an old church. It was almost as good as the businesses in old houses. The church still had stained glass windows and they were playing some gentle music to set the scene. Our culinary journey ended here, unless you count buying chips and soda at the gas station next to the campground 20 miles further west.

Yesterday: 57 miles
Today: 73 miles

Solitary cow on the plains

On rails

More trains

Outside a train

Inside a train

Look! Another train!

Not a train