NORTH DAKOTA and the things that happened there. Blamo.

            I will begin by apologizing for the long hiatus that seems to have wedged itself in between my postings. Truthfully, being a wilderness blogger-girl is taxing. One must wear a variety of hats: WiFi ninja! Intrepid typist!  And so on, you see.

            Anyway. I suppose one of the reasons I didn’t post much in North Dakota was that it was a tiring state. We were nearing the end of our trek through Minnesota when a few of us—Geordie, Margee, Brandon, and myself—decided it might be fun to race a 5k in Bowlus before riding the hundred miles to Battle Lake, MN.

            I swear, biking really fractionalizes the way you view distance. I was plodding along like a sad, fat puppy in a stranger’s shoes (I can’t stride in my Sidis, now can I?), but it felt shorter than any other run of my career. I do have a running career. Really. Mostly, I was reminding myself how much I will hate my life when cross country season comes around if I don’t get back into shoes with laces when this is over.

            The four of us ran, bought some Nut Rolls (a delightful indigenous candy!), and saddled our noble steeds for the century ride out to Battle Lake. I must admit—at that point of the day (I think it was around 9 am), I was still filled with cheery joy and happiness at a decent performance in the 5k. Heck, I won my age group, and a business-sized envelope with ten bucks in it (I won’t mention that it cost eighteen dollars to enter)! But, the day would get the best of me—soon, I was frowny. We got lost and missed the first rest stop. I spent six of those ten dollars at a gross Burger King. The wind continually slapped me in the face! I will say that I felt like four percent of a human being. The other ninety-six had been whittled away by the TRAVESTIES of this day.

            We arrived at camp after a full eight hours on the bike., only to discover that our compadres were campaigning to double the next day’s mileage in order to secure an extra rest day in Fargo. I was a grumpy bear. I assaulted several innocent bystanders in my lactic acid-inspired fury. Why! I would have never run if I knew I’d be doing double centuries! Well—I don’t think I would have. But I might be that dumb. Let’s leave it a mystery.

            But! There was water skiing in Battle Lake, AND cheese cubes. Those kindnessses made me smile.

            The next day, the plans to double into Fargo were dashed by reports of horrible storms brewing in the area, complete with tornadoes and golf ball-sized hail. I celebrated my vindication in silence, with homemade newspaper confetti. We rode instead to Pelican Rapids, where we spent the Fourth thrashing around in a lake and trying to invent a drinking game to go along with Bananagrams. We were unsuccessful. The attempt to the avoid the storm was a failure as well—around ten, it became apparent that it would be unwise, if not suicidal to remain outside in the elements. The valiant Mr. B-Weasel knocked on a window of a nearby old folks’ home and pleaded for assistance—mostly on behalf of the other Liz, who has a paralyzing fear of tornadoes. And storms with the potential to become tornadoes. It is a quite logical, really. I am trying to develop a similar phobia.

            Anyway. I spent the remainder of the evening sprawled on the tile in that retirement home’s ladies’ room. My classiness grows with every breath. I returned to the Emerald Palace at about three AM. The poor dear was just a little crumpled mess. Really—and I say this with the utmost respect for the tent—she’s just not going to survive another storm like that. I suppose the only real complaint I have (besides the fact that she struggles to remain upright) is that water pools in the corners, soaking anything that happens to be lounging there. In one instance, for example, the Emerald Palace thought it prudent to give Kathryn’s $200 camera a bath.

            The next day we set off for Fargo—North Dakota, at last! It was painfully slow. “I don’t feel like the champ that I normally do, Liz!” I wailed to the amazing Liz Dymond as my quads cried out in protest. Three hours of sleep with have that effect, I suppose! We rewarded our sleepy bodies with two nights in the Fargo Ho-Jo—once again, negotiated by the fabulous B-Weasel. He is a devilish negotiator, that boy!

            Anyway. That’s how we got to North Dakota. Crazy, huh? We’re in Montana now, and I’m still trying to catch you up! Gosh! I will go through each of the cities we stayed in chronologically, I suppose. HERE WE GO!!!!EXCLAMATIONPOINT!

HOPE, ND

            Hope was a very strange place. We pushed the destination thirteen miles further from Page, ND, because Hope was, apparently, a bustling metropolis of magic and wonderment. And there was a pool. It ended up being a slaughterfest of mosquitoes. I hid in my tent and watched The Shawshank Redemption. Oh, Tim Robbins! You’re so much better than DEET! Side note—I awoke in the night to pee. I barefootedly hobbled over to the janky pool area and saw, with my questionable-without-glasses vision, a parked car on the grass. “How odd!” I said to myself. The light was on and the blob where the door should have been looked like it could be open. I squinted a bit more, and saw a bald man. Think John Lithgow in season five of Dexter. This man was so scary. As I approached, Trinity slammed his car door and the light blinked out. I promptly began hyperventilating and sprinting to the bathroom. That was—and I say this with utmost confidence—the most exhilarating pee of my entire life.

PEKIN, ND

Pekin should not qualify as a town. It’s more like a hamlet. Or a playpen. We arrived after smashing in a tailwind for most of the day—we probably averaged between twenty-six and twenty-eight on some stretches. I was famished, and staggered into the only business for miles—the local bar! I asked for a cheeseburger, and, to my dismay, watched the bartender remove a packaged one from plastic wrap and stick it in an off-white microwave in the corner. My starvation made unhappiness with any sort of food impossible, though, so I ate the darn thing in about three bites. Yee! Most of us stayed in the Prarie View Inn that night. What can I say—I love showers and beds. Mmm, clean sheets! 

RUGBY, ND

            The ride into Rugby was tempered with a strong cross wind that caught my dished rims and dragged me all over the road. How polite of you, wind. There was one radio station on that say, and it played only Native American tribal pieces—I am certain they were cursing the white man with much musical TALENT!

            Rugby is the geographical center of the entire North American continent, by the way. Yes! We took pictures by the monument—a weird little cobblestoned pyramid thing. I don’t know who designed the thing, but maybe they should be fired. Or stoned. In Rugby, we were given free pizzas and some members of our clan narrowly avoided being arrested for scaling a grain silo. Fight the power!

SURREY, ND

            I can say without hesitation that Surrey is the black hole that the entire world will eventually crumble into. Flooding in Minot necessitated our stay here—when we went to explore “the town,” Margee and I discovered that Surrey had hoped that a gas station and a divey bar would qualify them as metropolitan. Surrey was also overrun by scary, anarchist teenagers who frowned excessively. I was thrown out of the bar when I asked for a glass of water. I suspect it is because of these bad, bad children and their terrible mischief.

MINOT, ND

 We didn’t overnight here, but we did investigate after we evacuated Surrey—apparenly, the Canadians mismanaged water levels in a series of dams (something to do with snowfall and also being Canadian), and ended up sloughing huge amounts of water over the border into North Dakota. The place was devastated. Entire buildings were gutted, and whole neighborhoods condemned. One house had a scotch-taped sign in the window, with “Goodbye house” scribbled by some little hand. It was depressing, really—such a careless mistake reset so many lives. Moral of the story: Down with Canada!

WILLISTON, ND

            Williston is where North Dakota suddenly became insane. There are, I guess, some huge and hereunto hidden pockets of oil out here in North Dakota. This is just now being discovered, and as such, the roads that Adventure Cycling routed us on are swollen with enormous oilrigs and every other kind of enormous truck in existence. This kind of riding is THE BEST. I am telling you, nothing is more fun than being slung forward by the eighty-mph draft of a ten-ton oil tanker! Nothing! Sure,it is horribly dangerous, and we were told by several truckers that they did their best to spot us, but to update our wills—BUT THE SPEED! THE SPEED, I SAY! I know of no other way to go so fast with such little effort. Besides blood doping, of course. The riding around Williston got super sketchy on the way into town. In retrospect, perhaps lethal is a better descriptor—many of us were nearly buzzed by mirrors or, in the cases of douchier drivers, the truck itself. Really! I’m in neon orange, for the love of Moses! You don’t get trucker points for having my blood all over your bumper, you mustachioed villains!

WOLF POINT, ND

I rode into Wolf Point cursing the time-old adage that requires the sun to set in the west. My nose is severely sunburned. This town sported a lovely brewery that doubled as a breakfast place in the mornings and had free popcorn. I was instantly sold. The campsite had a pool with more prison showers (yay for bathing fully clothed!), and there was a ferocious storm, apparently, but I slept through the entire thing. I sleep like a champ.

GLASGOW, ND

I spent the entire day thinking about ABBA’s classic hit, Super Trouper:

I was sick and tired of everything / when I called you last night from Glasgow!/ All I do is eat and sleep and sing/ wishing every show was the last show

We aren’t even going to that Glasgow. But I suppose that is irrelevant. We are here now, after a short fifty-six mile day, camping outside of a perfectly good hotel like hoboes.

MORE LATER, MY DARING READERS! I am hungry for waffle crisp.

One Sandwich to Rule them All...

The thirtieth of June was a magical day. I awoke in the Bayliss abode (in the master bed, actually), where we’d weathered our double-rest days in the Twin cities. The other, grander Liz’s wonderful (and sometimes, she tells me, under-celebrated) Dad was slinging pancakes like it was a full-time profession, or they were projectiles or something. But good projectiles, of course, no shortness of positivity! I ate three. This was the morning I would begin my abdication of caffeine—ours had been a tumultuous relationship, and I decided that the heart palpitations I’d been experiencing in the heat of my daytime bicycle crushing were the final,cosmic clue. We’ve been separated for three days.

            Anyway. So, if any of you four people who read this have ever tried to quit the coffee habit, you probably know how damnable it is—you get the shakes, a terrible headache, and so on and so forth. The first twenty miles were sad and sweaty! We arrived in the cute, little riverside town of Stillwater after several miles on some bike trail whose name escapes me. I was irritable and slightly starving and convinced that my somewhat-low average speed could be blamed on some mechanical malady afflicting my bicycle. I slathered the drive train with degreaser and scrubbed viciously.            

            After Samson was once again sparkling and I was convinced that there was nothing actually wrong with him, I joined several other Bike the Us-ers for lunch at Leo’s downtown. Well—I guess I didn’t really join them, I kind of stalked them there and then sat down at a booth that wasn’t totally full. But hey, I do what must be done! My boothy conquest housed Geordie, Margee, and Mr. Alex Pearlman. I was quite pleased with my selection. Skylar shouted from another table, “Liz! You’ve got to get the Double Jumbo!” Double Jumbo, I thought! What is this! SOME SORT OF TRICK!?

            I opened a menu and there it was—a sandwich. No! Not just any sandwich. This was the sandwich to sandwich all other sandwiches—Bacon! Onions! One, greasy pound of hamburger meat! THREE SLICES OF OBESE, SOURDOUGH BREAD. It was thirteen dollars, and if I ate everything on my plate within twenty minutes, I got a shirt. Margarine Ankles and I discussed the outcomes of the contest. Could we eat such a sandwich? Was the shirt bombastic enough to warrant such gastrointestinal unhappiness? It was red, and had a cherry over “O” in Leo’s. HOW COULD I SAY NO? Margee decided against the challenge just as she ordered. I said, “Bring me the Double Jumbo, please!” The waitress looked a little excited. I would like to think that I made her shift slightly more exciting. After ordering I was excited—filled with confidence, you could say. I could eat this sandwich! Clearly my fat belly could fit such a morsel inside! But then, as I sat in the booth, I started to really think about it—a whole pound! What if I failed—the shame! I became intensely nervous and sweated a little big more than is socially acceptable. The ladies at the table next door frowned.

            Well. Soon, the moment arrived—our little waitress brought the plate bearing my culinary destiny. It was massive, and whoever had slung the burgers pierced a broad steak knife through the burger’s drippy, bacon-crumble heart.  The rule with the Double Jumbo is that you’ve got to finish within twenty minutes. That sounded like an excessively long amount of time, so I was hardly worried. I drew the sword from what would probably become my kidney stone and sliced horizontally. The twenty minutes began. The first half was easy—I was starving, and it actually did taste pretty good! Nom, nom! The difficulty really entered in around 75%, I’d say. The burger sort of stopped tasting like food, and as I tried to swallow, little baby bites were still stuck in my esophagus, begging for expulsion. BUT! That red shirt looked so darn cool. So I stuffed my mouth with more sandwich.

            I finished in thirteen minutes and fifteen seconds (the entire thing is on video if you don’t believe me—but it is rather gruesome). I felt like a champ. The champ of champs! I waved my red shirt of victory above my head. Alex Pearlman tweeted my victory to the world. I was king for the entirety of the next five minutes. After that, the horror of what I had just done seemed to register within all of my biological systems, and each of them began to rebel against my obvious incapacity to rule. I stumbled outside, and back to the trailer in agony. It was like someone had filled my entire body cavity with bacon bits and mashed potatoes.

            I tried to keep moving around, looking for someplace I could go into a coma. I flopped down beneath a large tree overlooking the river. It might’ve been scenic if I could have ignored the powerful urge to die.

            I decided that it might be a good idea to sip some water, let the food settle—MISTAKE! The second I put that waterbottle to my lips, I knew that there was no going back. I dove almost entirely into a garbage can and the Double Jumbo became the Double BALGASFNHASLFKHAMHALKMFHFFFFFFFFF.

            But I still have the shirt! THAT MEANS I WIN.

            OTHER EXCITING POINTS OF THE DAY:

1)   1) swimming with Geordie and Margee in the swollen river

2)   2) cycling shirtless for thirty miles

3)   3) becoming so sunburned that I could neither sleep nor wear enough clothing to go into public.