T1 Day 24 (Kayla)

June 30, 2022

When biking across the country you have to get on the bike and go nearly every day whether you want to or not. That’s the hardest part about this trip in my opinion. Most days there are good views, fun downhills, cute towns, or good conversation to make the hours on the bike go by, but today we only had our own fortitude to get us through, and podcasts. Thank goodness for music and podcasts! It was one of those days where we all had to dig deep to find the motivation to keep going. You could just tell by our silent biking that we were all a bit fed up with eastern Montana. It was day 5 on the same road (highway 200) with the same views (mixed grassland). When we first headed into the grasslands 6 days ago I was in awe of the vastness of the landscape. Today I barely even bothered to lift my head up to look around. The vastness had become a torment. It turns out it’s not always enjoyable to be able to see all of the hills you have to climb laid out in front of you one after the other! 

The day started with me breaking out into full body hives AGAIN (see Liz’s post for more details). I have know idea what the cause might be, but a google search told me that common causes include heat exposure, bug bites, prolonged exercise, stress, or environmental allergens. Just great - That should be easy to resolve! Since the rest stop where we had camped was at at least 30 miles from a town I had no choice but to pop another Benadryl, lather myself in cortisone cream, and keeping getting ready for our day of biking. After about 45 minutes the itchy body on fire sensation subsided and I was left to focus on the heat of the sun bearing down on us. The longer we biked the hotter it got. We didn’t even bother stopping to take breaks for more than a minute since the sun was so intense. After 30 miles we reached the town of Circle where we took refuge from the heat at a park of dinosaur statues and made friends with a cute and cuddly kitty. While there a kind man saw us sweating and brought us each cold ice water and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed water quite so much. From there we moved on half a mile to the grocery store, to get me more allergy medication, and then to the one restaurant in town. We don’t often go out to eat, but the air conditioned building was a must, plus they had ice cream! After a long lunch break we were back to it, and somehow I think it had gotten even hotter. We ended up on a loose gravel road for a few miles, but we survived it without any incidents. Then for the remaining 50 miles of biking we didn’t talk much, none of us had the energy to carry a conversation, there wasn’t much to say. So we played podcasts to distract ourselves. I chose a this American life episode about first contact, a life kit episode about relationships, an up first episode, and 2 Huberman lab episodes, one about genetic inheritance and the other about maintaining motivation, which was obviously the most relevant. if you’re curious, the take-away was adequate sleep and yoga nidra, so I’ll give it a try and give my updates in a few days. For the final 10 miles we rotated taking the lead so the others could draft and conserve our last drops of energy, and finally we made it to Glendive! First stop  - grocery store. We made a beeline to the cold drinks and all grabbed a blue Powerade to drink as we walked around the store and picked out the rest of our groceries. Our Final destination was an RV park we had found last minute after our warm showers host cancelled on us. Thankfully it all worked out and lots of food, warm showers, and clean clothes have us feeling like brand new humans again. Tomorrow we say good bye to montana, and we honestly can’t wait, we thought it would never end! Also there are beds waiting for us on at a house in bismarck (which we should reach in 3 days) and that’s been keeping us going. 

Check back tomorrow for our review of Montana!