87 miles
869 miles to date
Wow, we woke up to blue skies and no wind! It's been a while since we've seen that!
This is looking back at the Crazy Mountains toward the west.
We rode the frontage road to Reedpoint, freeway for a few miles to exit 400, then frontage all the way into Billings. I had never been on the "old" road from Reedpoint to Columbus; it's beautiful back there. We met a young man on a single bike heading west (into the wind which had come up) and we stopped to chat for a while. He had left New York the first of April and was going to end in Washington. He wanted to ride down into Yellowstone but had heard there was a lot of new snow there so didn't know if he would or not.
We didn't intend (again) for this to be such a high mileage day, but we needed to go into Billings to find a bike shop so that added several miles. Yesterday the bike developed a "mystery random click" that we just could not put our finger on. I had thought it was Gerry's rain pants flapping on the frame, but it was still here today. Every time we'd stop for a break, we'd check something else to try to eliminate it. It seemed like Chinese water torture to me! Aaaarrrgh! We wanted to get a third set of eyes and ears to check it out. The problem was that we couldn't reproduce it by just turning the crank, we had to be on the bike pedaling.
We went to The Spoke Shop (at 1910 Broadwater) where Don very kindly looked at the bike, took the front crank out, cleaned and greased it. He said that riding in rain can cause grit buildup in there which can bring on this sort of tinny click. He spent over a half hour on it and wouldn't take any payment! Thank you, Don!
Unfortunately, that didn't eliminate it, though we have noticed that it's a little less frequent. Do we go back tomorrow or go on? We'd think and pray about it.
We rode on through town to the KOA, set up camp, showered, then decided we'd reward our long day with pizza. (I never did get that pizza back in Spokane as we took Will to a buffet instead. Young men love those!) Gerry had seen a Pizza Hut sign out of the corner of his eye about a mile back, so we hopped on the bike and rode back. Rats! it was only a carry out, and I wasn't about to try to balance a pizza back there! So..no pizza yet. Back to the campground and another pasta and tuna meal over the Jetboil. We had a game of cribbage (thanks, Mom, for the lightweight board) while we ate.
Though the skies began to darken, we knew that we wouldn't get the snow that was coming down in Bozeman. We did get rain and wind during the night, but the tent did well through it.
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