MT to ND

Wednesday saw us pedal further across the plains and make our way into our fourth state of the trip, North Dakota. Waking up in the morning we still had the winds to our backs, and knew we had to take further advantage of them. Tuesday's distance was a bit more modest than the prior day's as we came in around 50 miles total, but we got some much needed rest in Wolf Point that night which left us rearing to go Wednesday morning.

Pedaled for a couple hours and found ourselves in Culbertson MT, where we all had the great pleasure of being treated to lunch by Julie Maier her daughters Meghan and Rachel, and her Mom Jean Johnston. Julie is a close family friend of mine from Kingman AZ and she and her daughters have been huge supporters (and blog readers) of ours. The three lovely Maier ladies have been getting back to their roots here in Montana and along with Julie's mom Jean were able to drive down to Culbertson to meet us for lunch and a great visit. It was really nice to see familiar faces, and these four happen to be particularly nice. Karl Miller's List of Potential Wives just gained a couple more entries. All four of us really enjoyed ourselves and our afternoon was much more pleasant as a result. Sincere thanks from all of us to you lovely ladies.

Also while in Culbertson, we stopped by the Post Office to pick up another huge batch of the most amazing homemade jerky ever, shipped to us by one of the loveliest of lovely ladies, my mom Sherrine. Thanks Mom, from us and the beef industry.

After a second lunch of snack food from the Maier's snacks and my Mom's jerky, we pedaled through the afternoon and eventually made it here to Willingston in time to set up camp in another city park and feast on chicken burritos.

It was another sunny day in Paradise, in total covering 102 miles with almost 6 hours in the saddle. Already we've noticed nicer road conditions here in North Dakota and look forward to more of the smooth ND road to come.

Tomorrow, we're going to pick up some supplies in town, hopefully get my bottom bracket checked out, then hit the road towards Minot.

All for now, take care, thanks to everyone for all the support!

-Devin

ps. Karl mentioned the group of cyclists we saw in Chinook. They are a group of three guys who are doing the same trip as us but in the reverse direction. During our planning stages I started reading their blog to get an idea of what we might expect during out travels. I expected we'd encounter them sooner or later and it was really nice finally meeting them. We all wished we could have spent more time with them. They've got a very well written blog which you can see here.