Welcome to Montana!

Since getting into montana we have had some interesting hosts and some good times. I will try to write down a few of these here.

Montana is one more of the many states that I haven't ever been too. At first I was not a huge fan of Montana becuase it is a little bit boring, and although it is a desert, it has more mosquitos than anywhere else I have ever been to. Well anyway, we have been in Montana for almost four days now. We were met in Culbertson on the first day with one of the friendliest congregations we have had (That is saying something). They let us use their personal laundry machines, fed us extrememly well, and even donated several hundred dollars of repair work when the van broke down yet again.

The next day our Pastor was a bicycle fanatic. He used to lead tours for Adventure cycling, and rode all around the country on a tandem with his wife. He also helped repair some peoples bicycle equipment, and even gave Isiah a new pair of handlebars. That church was pretty cool.

The next night, in Glasgow, we stayed in an church that was called simply "Evangelical Church." The youth pastor who greeted us was very friendly and showed us around the church. The church had a full basketball quart, all sorts of AV equipment, a stage full of musical instraments, pool, ping pong, a very large brand new sancturary, and an older one set up with a huge projector screen where he had a wii and all sorts of fun games involving shooting people. Playing shooting-people-games in a former church sancturary first struck me as a little strange, but hey, the pastor set it up. What impressed me the most was when the youth pastor told me that almost all of the new building had been donated/built by volunteers from within the church. I spent the last hour before going to bed playing drums with Ian before finally getting a little bit of sleep.

By this time things on the road were getting to a level of boring that I had thought not possible. When they say that Montana is Big sky country, they arent joking. And the reason why they say that is becuase there is nothing to look at but the sky, well, there is also grass and a few hills. We can see things at least 15 miles in the distance, this can often take about an hour to get to, so we just ride on for an hour staring at the same thing. But anyway the group decided to try and figure out some more fun stuff to do to keep the riding interesting, so we decided to play a stupid game called assassins. All this did is make people become completely skitzafrenic (yeah, I don't know hot to spell, well I don't care). So the day of the 5th nobody would get off their bike at lunch for fear of being killed. Also lunch was right next to a lagoon, and four seconds after I stopped my bike at lunch I had about 10 mosquitoes on my legs. I just filled up my waterbottle, grabbed some bread and left. So after about 60 miles of biking and no stopping me and the three people (Dan, Kevin, and Reed) with me were kinda tired. We stopped to read a historic interest sign about three miles out of Saco, and some random guy in a truck told us that there was a hot springs and pool about one mile down a side road that we should go to.

It sounded like fun so we went. We ended up spending over two hours at the springs, swimming and talking to the man and his wife who ran the place. It just randomly turned out that this guy was on the board of a local Fuller Center for Housing branch, and had been involved with affordible housing for years and years. They didn't even make us pay to use the springs. The man was also running for Montana House distric 35 as a Democrat. We wished him luck, it is these sort of encounters that make keep the trip interesting.

-John R

North Dakota

Hey everybody.

If anyone is actually reading this (other than you Mom), or attempting to, you might have noticed that I have been posting very little lately. This is due to two reasons. The first reason is that I have been very busy. For some reason, even though I don't really have much that I have to do each day, I never seem to time to do anything except eating, sleeping, and biking. The second reason is because I see the wisdom in these words spoken by Voltaire, "The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out." So basically I am just trying to keeping from boring any one.

But anyway, there has been a lot of exciting things happening recently. Two nights ago I woke up from the floor of a womens bathroom in a National park. A week ago we stayed on a legit farm, and I got to ride a horse, a tractor and meet Isiah's wonderful family. Most of these events have already been extensively journaled so I wont repeat all of the details, but long story short North Dakota has proved to be much more exciting than I expected, although I was not expecting much.

We have also gone through some very interesting areas. The Badlands in western North Dakota are like nothing I have ever seen before. They remind me of New Mexico. We have also spent a fair amount of time going through Native American reservations, most of which are a little different from everywhere else. New Town especially was strange. It is in the middle of a tribal reservation, and it is currently also in the middle of a huge oil boom. Every thirty seconds or so we were passed by a extra long tanker truck. I wandered around the town a little bit, and basically the only people that I saw were poor looking native Americans, Bikers (the real kind) and almost cartoonist looking oil-men.

As always, our hosts have been almost ridiculously generous. I am a little worried that something might happen to my bike because we are well over 200 or 300 miles from a bicycle shop. But at least all of this has given me things to think about while I ride my way through the mind-numbingly boring northeastern part of Montana.