You Wind Some You Lose Some

I failed to take a single photograph on the ride to Glasgow, or Glasscow, as we took to calling it. The shoulder was erratic all day and the truck traffic genuinely bad. At one point on a downhill a gust caught me hard enough to send me into the gravel sloping off the edge of the road, and though I managed to stay upright, I pulled over immediately to make sure Eal and Flavia had made it through the same stretch safely behind me.

We arrived with time to spare, spent a while at the library, and treated ourselves to a proper meal out for once. It wasn’t a bad little place either, and I had a pasta dish that felt long overdue, complemented by a glass of wine before we turned in.

The ride to Malta had us dodging some nasty-looking rain clouds through the morning, with a second breakfast at a rest area to wait out the worst of it. The afternoon brought headwinds straight from the front. Eal put his head down and trucked on impressively, but I could see Flavvy was rather less amused by the conditions, so we fell into some drafting to keep the group moving together, unwilling to repeat the day we’d lost between Tappen and Steele. Bad jokes aside, I genuinely enjoy her company on the bike, and we made it into Malta together for a free camp in the city park. We cooked dinner as a three and shared a few beers Flavvy bought as thanks for the afternoon’s support.

Malta city park, tea time!

The winds were gentler the next day as we set out for Chinook, gentle enough that we started thinking we might push further still, all the way to Havre. The cycling gods, or the “East Glacier Front” as one local called it, had other ideas, and in what felt like no time at all our tailwind turned into a strong, gusting headwind. It was a repeat of the previous afternoon, Eal trucking steadily on while I drafted alongside Flavarillo. We kept ourselves entertained working through puns on the town’s name, pronounced Have-er rather than the way it looks, and eventually reached it to find Eal already slumped outside a gas station, thoroughly beaten by the wind. The station adjoined an RV park, so we bought a shower for five dollars each before heading to the town park to camp for free. While we were cooking dinner, a few homeless and visibly drunk people wandered over. They were entirely non-threatening, offering us nothing but good wishes and prayers, but it was a difficult, sad scene all the same. Flavia is an extraordinarily compassionate person, and she sat with one of the women, clearly upset by her own circumstances, and comforted her properly. She probably won’t thank me for saying it was touching, but it was, and I’m grateful to have had her with us.

We had a slow start the next morning, watching the flags outside snap violently in the wrong direction over breakfast. We decided to do some laundry and see how the wind developed rather than gamble on the road. Laundry done, we headed to the grocery store to find the wind had, if anything, worsened, badly enough that my fully loaded bike, simply leaning against a wall, was blown clean over. That settled it. We would take a rest day in Havre rather than fight the wind all day for little progress.

As we were leaving the store to find somewhere to sit it out, a man at the service desk called us over. His name was Bob, he lived locally, and he offered us his basement on the spot. His boss drove us up to his place in her pickup, bikes stacked in the back, and with Bob working until ten that night, we had the whole afternoon ahead of us. We filled it making genuinely excellent pizza, followed by brownies, hands down the best pizza of the entire trip, and rounded the evening off with wine and a few episodes of Arrested Development, which had Flavsome and me in stitches.

The incredible pizza we made.

Flavia’s Julia Child impression.

We hadn’t seen Bob by the time we turned in, but he was up in time for the breakfast Flavia rustled up the next morning, eggs in a nest. It was good fun talking with him about the years of putting up strangers, cyclists among them, at his place, clearly a great man for it.

About twenty miles into the ride we stopped at a lonely-looking cafe-bar for a second breakfast. A cluster of home nations football shirts hung on the wall, and it turned out the owner was from London. By this stage of the trip I could see towns ten or twenty miles off before we ever reached them, which somehow helps keep the focus and, I think, makes the riding faster. We also caught our first sight of the Rockies on the horizon, proof, finally, that we were covering real ground.

Carrying on the Havre jokes, our destination that day, Galata, was every bit as pun-worthy, and Flavvy and I spent the last ten miles trading terrible lines like “we’re gonna have Galata fun tonight,” the sort of joke that only really works if you were there. I was there, in Galata, and I thought it was funny. We camped behind an unmanned motel with the back door left open for shower access, a strange arrangement but one that did the job for a cheap night’s sleep.

Bob.

Second Breakfast. Sorry about the peanuts, Brad.