Day 29 – July 2 – Medora, ND to Bismark, ND – 139 Miles

This was Joe’s idea.

We set the alarm for 4:00 AM.  A tailwind was predicted. Quite a bit of wind and lightening swept through the area in the late evening and overnight.  There were just a few drops of rain.  We were hoping to get a jump on the day to beat the heat. It seems that our morning “routine” takes 2 hours from alarm to getting on the road.  The same was true today as we left camp a little after 6.  As we were leaving Joe asked about our destination.  There were several options at 65, 80, and 104 miles out.  Joe suggested Bismarck at around 140 miles.  We would see how that works.

It was a beautiful morning, cool, still, and quiet.  We stopped and took a photo of the sun as it rose over the ridge east of Medora.  We would be on I-94 for most of the day today and we got back on, east of Medora.  A few miles east is the Painted Canyon Visitor’s Center.  We stopped, and got a few more photos and video of the North Dakota Badlands in the early morning light.  As we rode east, dark clouds gathered overhead shadowing us from the sun and keeping us cool.  The dark cloud also produced some spectacular dry lightening strikes several miles ahead.  We thought we ought to take a bit of break to let that pass.

20 miles down the road we made a breakfast stop in Belfield for coffee and muffins.  It seems that the entire western portion of North Dakota is caught up in an oil boom.  Our route originally planned to go via Williston and Minot, was changed by Adventure Cycling to go south through Dickinson.  The oil boom is going on here as well.  Belfield and Dickinson are crowded with trucks and crews working the fields.  In the fields can be seen wells and periodically the flames as excess natural gas is burned off.

Our lunch stop was in Dickinson.  We each saved a half of our Subway sandwich for later in the day.  We topped off our camel backs with water and ice and continued east.  Just east of Dickinson I-94 was under constructions so we opted to take “Old Highway 10” for about 20 miles where we returned to I-94.  This section of interstate avoids many of the small towns on parallel Old  Highway 10 by about 5 miles.  Unfortunately there is no commercial development of the exits to these towns along the interstate.  There was a stretch of over 60 miles with no services.  Finally we came to a rest area.  We ended up spending an hour cooling off and finishing the sandwiches from lunch.  We refilled our almost empty camel backs before continuing on to New Salem, ND.

We entered the Central Time Zone as we crossed into Morton, County west of New Salem. New Salem is the first developed exit east of Dickinson. It has a couple gas stations a restaurant and motel.  This could have been a good stopping point at 104 miles for the day.  We had dinner and decided to continue on for another 35 miles to Bismarck.  This would put us about halfway through the state.

We got into Bismarck late, but with feelings that we had accomplished something.  While I checked in at the hotel, Joe ran across the street to pick up a much needed reward at the local DQ.