T1 Day 19 (Keelin)

 6/25/2023

Okay everybody. Sit down and buckle up because we have a wild tale to tell you. Our day started off very leisurely as our original plan was just 50 miles and about 1,500 feet of elevation gain- simple, right??? Well that’s what we thought too… in fact we thought that it was just tooooo simple. After eating breakfast in the RV park laundry room that we had commandeered for charging our devices and meals, we were in no rush to start our day. We had a nice SPEEDY 25 mile ride to Shelby where we all thought… hey. if that’s how it’s gunna be (all flat, little bit of tailwind), we can definitely make it to Great Falls!! Great falls was our planned destination for tomorrow night- 112 miles away from Cut Bank where we started this morning. This, I believe, is where the Great Falls seed was planted in our determined minds. We carried on to Conrad, our original planned destination- was pretty uneventful to get there… some dirt road and some mild climbs but nothing really happened. We all felt good. We took a lunch break in Conrad while we let a little bought of rain pass us by and collectively decided to get to the next town, Brady (the last town with a place for us to sleep until Great Falls), and then make a decision. The 10 miles to Brady flys by… we get there and there really isn’t anywhere to pitch a tent… we’ve gone 65ish miles at this point… it’s about 3:30 PM… someone says, “should we keep going?”… next thing you know we are committed to Great Falls. Thankfully we had a warmshowers host lined up to host us for tomorrow night and was very flexible with their schedule. So there we are, on a frontage road that followed interstate 15 alllllllll the wayyyyyy to Great Falls, Montana. But doesn’t that just sound a little too easy for the three of us? There has to be a catch, right? You bet!!! We get to Dutton, MT (35 miles the destination) and we get slammed with an afternoon thunderstorm making for the worst weather we have experienced this trip. There were cross winds that pushed our bikes across the road and had us feeling like we were biking at an angle and rain that may or may not have been hail (it sure did hurt). We were pulled over by a couple that had just come from Great Falls and said the visibility was horrible- his father is a warmshowers host in Great Falls (but this wasn’t who we were planning on staying with) so he was familiar with the app, is a fellow cyclist, and invited us to seek shelter at his house around the corner. We GLADLY accepted and followed him home. Him and his wife cooked us a nice warm meal and chatted with us until we could see the sun peaking through the windows. When we had first arrived it was unclear if we were welcome to stay the night… we were getting different vibes from the man than we were from the woman (they did just drop the kids off at grandma and grandpas so quiet house was probably a motivating factor). I was honestly shocked they were able to just whip up dinner for 3 more people. Anyway, eventually at 7 pm we look at each other all having understood from the many hints dropped that we should head out. We end up on the road at 7:30 pm with 35 miles to go and 2 hours until sunset. It felt a little frustrated to be sent out on this seemingly impossible journey because I’m not sure if you can do the quick math… we weren’t going to make it. We all knew it but no one said a thing- we biked in pretty much silence except for kayla’s music that came in and out of my earshot as we ebbed and flowed in closeness through climbs and descents. At one point I looked around at Kayla and Liz on either side of me and thought to myself how grateful I am to have embarked on this journey with two incredibly resilient, gritty, and positive women. We knew we had to get as close to Great Falls as possible and hope that the nice people housing us for the night would help us out. They lived a few miles off route for us so they were already picking us up in town and taking us to their home…. it felt like we would be asking a lot but we genuinely had to other options. Just before 9:30 (official sunset time) we called Jim and Michelle… we were 10 miles from the Walmart. They told us to keep biking and they would drive towards us until they found us…. THANK GOODNESS. We made it within 4 miles of the Walmart making our total cycling distance 108 miles for the day. If you know the 3 of us, we are committed to cycling this whole route and were not excited to be getting into a car, but this was a necessary exception… we were simply out of daylight. We got in the truck and laughed about it all the way to the house we stayed at- laughed mostly about how crazy it was to decide to bike 100 miles at basically 3:30 pm. We all took showers and hung out with Michelle for a few minutes before hitting the hay in their home gym in the garage. We laid down the barely used gym mats and whipped out our sleeping bags.. we honestly didn’t even care where we slept, we just wanted to get off our feet and close our eyes. All in all, we biked our longest 108 miles, experienced all different types of weather systems, were rescued not once but twice by strangers, and shared lots of smiles and laughs. I guess it wasn’t a bad day after all :)