Day 57: Easy Rider

The elevation profile for the day looked like the best of the entire trip — a long, gentle downhill all the way to Ennis, something like two thousand feet lost over the distance for almost no effort. Knowing that, Wim and I allowed ourselves an unusually lazy morning and didn’t actually set off until eleven. Leaving the Yellowstone corridor behind brought back the quiet riding conditions we’d gotten used to before all the tourist traffic — hardly a car in sight.

We flew past Earthquake Lake, caused, unsurprisingly, by an earthquake a long time ago, and stopped for a quick lunch at a rest area. While I was occupying the single bathroom stall, a man came in trailing three young kids, two of whom promptly stuck their heads under the door to say hello while they waited their turn. Their father was furious. I thought it was one of the funnier things that had happened to me all week.

The pace stayed brisk the rest of the way, and we covered more than seventy miles into Ennis by early afternoon without ever really working for it. I stopped in a store to ask directions to the campground and ended up talking to an old man who’d spent a few days in Newcastle decades ago, in the middle of some European tour of his own back in the eighties. We found the others already settled at the campground, having left earlier that morning, and the whole group spent a while agreeing on how good a day it had been. Terry had even bought a bottle of champagne to mark the occasion — you don’t get many days of free miles on a trip like this.

I picked up a cheap Subway for dinner, and afterward we sat around the camp table talking until an eastbound cyclist wandered over and joined us. Wim, warming to his own joke, mentioned that his bear spray was really there for NRA members — a callback to some run-in weeks earlier with a man who’d threatened him on the road. The joke landed badly, mostly because this particular stranger turned out to be an NRA member himself. It hardly mattered — the guy was something of a jerk regardless, cycling the TransAm while arranging blind dates online in every town he passed through. Good luck in Kentucky.