[bike] what divide by what?

Hurray! We have crossed the Continental Divide!! What a day to get over those mountains!

 

I guess I'll start from where I left off at Missoula. Geraldine (the lovely woman who let us stay over: she's a bike tourer herself) bid us farewell. We got a late start from her house because we were still getting used to the time change...we are in mountain time now. At some point we stopped at a gas station because Karen broke 1000 miles!! We celebrated with ice cream. I don't know how many miles they rode before Portland...so I don't know how many miles I've ridden.

 

We stayed overnight at a ranch town called Ovando. It looked exactly like a town from the 1800s: it had saloons and a small store. We got a chance to visit the museum to see how people out in the rural/ranch/rodeo towns of Montana lived. We camped next to the museum: nice except for the lots of MOSQUITOS!

 

Next day we biked to the Continental Divide! The entire way was rolling hills; the uphills were steep, and the downhills weren't very satisfying because they weren't very steep and we had a head wind. The head wind got stronger during the day; I was so frustrated going at 7 miles an hour on flat land...Even worse was that we had climb over McDonald Mountain Pass to get to the Divide line. That meant climbing a steep hill, with a strong headwind, after 53 miles of biking already done that day. I had to give my legs and my bike a lot of encouragement to get up to the top. But I did it! without walking my bike and only one stop to take a short breath. I was proud of myself.

 

We camped on the Continental Divide where there were also a lot of mosquitos. Today we biked only 50 miles from the Divide to Townsend, via big city Helena. The first miles down from the Pass was super fast. I LOVE downhills!! But it was such a hard 50 miles afterward: the weather was sweltering hot (100?) and the strong head wind did not go away. I felt like a bull, trying to barrage my way through. The miles went by very slowly, so slowly I stopped trying to count down the miles. Now I'm exhausted, but glad that this library is airconditioned! Woohoo!

 

why is Montana so big?

minwah