Day 17: Stuck Inside Of Bismarck ...

... With the (Headwind, High Temp, T-Storm) Blues Again.  

We kind of anticipated this but hoped that we would find a way around it, but strong winds from the east this morning tipped us into taking a day off here in Bismarck. Rest days are always welcome but this one is a bit of a shame as we felt pretty energized today despite the long ride yesterday, and would rather have saved it up for a day when we felt a lot more fatigued and depleted.  

We stayed at a Hampton Inn where Crystal took very good care of us, and made our way to a few spots in Bismarck, including a local bike shop where we picked up some spare tubes and CO2 cartridges. We have been fortunate that we’ve only had a few flat tires (one puncture and two pinch flats), the last one of which we repaired as efficiently as any NASCAR pit crew. Well, maybe not that good, but we decided that we are good enough and, therefore don’t need any more practice in the flat tire repair department. Perhaps some practice in not getting them in first place, though.

We also took our free time today to start plotting our route through Minnesota and Wisconsin. Route planning in the west mainly involved selecting a corridor that you would be on for at least a few hundred miles (unless you change your mind mid-stream, like we did). There are a lot more roads as you move into the Midwest and routes involve a lot more intersections and road changes - something that we are starting to ge our heads around now. 

The big story here of course is the case of the missing sock. A nice side benefit of being laid up for a day is the opportunity to catch up on some laundry, of which we don’t have all that much and, not being models of good hygiene, don’t do as often as we should. Somehow, and unexplainedly, we managed to lose a sock in a tiny load of laundry and in a tiny laundry room. It may be just one of those things, but we have not completely ruled out foul play yet. No one is above suspicion. The search continues.

We’ll be back on our bikes tomorrow even though weather forecasts continue to call for winds that work against us.  We’ll probably have some slow going, but we are anxious to keep up our momentum.

P.S.   Also, we really appreciate all of you who have been following along and those of you who have offered comments.  Reading them helps keep us going.  We’ve also been told that it is sometimes difficult to input comments.  We’re (obviously) novices in the blogging sphere but tried to arrange it so that commenting would be easy.  Please keep trying.  We will too; we’ll see if we did something wrong on our end.