The Shower Free Three

Leaving Bismarck along the bike path the next morning was so cold I ended up riding with one hand on the bars and the other stuffed inside my jacket, swapping over whenever the exposed one began to turn white. We all bought cheap gloves at the first gas station of the day, gloves, in the middle of August, and then, a few hours later, we were lathering on suncream again as if the morning had never happened.

We had no fixed destination for the evening, but after a map session Flavia remembered an eastbounder telling her about an abbey in Richardton that put cyclists up for the night, so she called ahead and squared the arrangement. Along the way we picked up some free country music CDs, despite neither of us owning anything to play them on, and I started up a round of what I called the Elevation Game, in which my co-riders had to guess our current elevation off the Garmin, closest guess wins. A wild bunch, clearly. The abbey turned out to be a fine night’s free camping, no showers again, but by then we all smelled roughly equally bad, so it hardly registered as a complaint.

Assumption Abbey.

Father Otto had welcomed us the evening before and came out again in the morning to see us off and wish us safe travels. We were on the road early, a quick gas station breakfast during which we were offered farm work on the spot, which we filed away for consideration after Australia. The ride to Medora brought an extraordinary change of scenery from the flat grasslands we’d grown used to. We pulled off to see the Painted Canyon, then rode on into the North Dakota Badlands through the southern unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Medora itself was a wonderful little tourist town, and we celebrated the day’s ride with onion rings and a beer before heading to the campground on the edge of town for a long, long overdue shower, four days in the making, and a proper load of laundry.

Painted Canyon.

It was an easy decision to head into Medora for a proper cafe breakfast the next morning. The owner working the kitchen looked less than thrilled to find us charging our phones off his power outlets, but the waitress made up for it with genuine warmth, and we promised her we’d order enough food to earn the electricity.

The day stayed clear and hot, and we rode out along an old railway track as the countryside gradually thinned back into empty landscape. The last stretch into Glendive forced us back onto the freeway, and it delivered us, at last, into Montana, another new state. We found a watering hole for a post-ride bottle of Blue Moon before Flavia, or rather Flav-Nav, guided us out to the RV campground marked on our maps. It turned out to be thoroughly run down, with no obvious spot to pitch a tent beyond a scrap of scruffy grass in the corner by the railway line, no water spigot, let alone a shower or a toilet. Flavski managed to get the owner on the phone, and she told us we were welcome to stay free of charge if we really wanted to, and stay we did. Travelling alone, it would have made for a miserably poor stop, but with the bugs biting and the trains honking through half the night, the three of us just looked at each other and burst out laughing. It’s remarkable what good company can do to a genuinely bad situation.

Medora, ND.

GlenDIVE camp spot.

Nobody was in a hurry to linger at that campsite the next morning, so coffee in town was the first order of business. For Flavia it was really a restroom she was after, since she takes exception to the fact Eal and I can simply wander over to a tree when nature calls. I pointed her toward a few discreet spots, which she declined on principle, and spent the rest of the night and most of the following morning quietly regretting it.

The road out of Glendive took us onto an Indian reservation. The reservations of eastern Montana carry a grim reputation for gambling, alcoholism and poor health, and arriving in Wolf Point it was easy to see where that reputation came from, the scene by the gas station alone was sad enough to sit with for a while. We camped in the city park, warned to lock our bikes carefully, and the evening turned out pleasant enough in the end, no shower, but plenty of good food, Flavvy once again pooling her pantry with ours to put together something better than either of us could have managed alone. She really is remarkably generous.