Day 8
Day By Day Notes From The Road
Back To Itinerary
This document updated July 6th, 2004
Thompson Falls Montana to Missoula Montana - 101 Miles
By Lucija:
Today was a strange day. The first half was just like yesterday - very enjoyable and stunningly gorgeous. We followed beautiful Clark Fork river through a scenic valley on a quiet country road. Just wonderful.
For the second half of our ride, our peaceful road met up with US93, which is one of the roads from Glacier National Park leading back towards civilization. On July 5th (ie, day after 4th of July weekend) this narrow road was FILLED with tourists driving back home in HUGE camper trailers. In my opinion these people (1) have NO clue how wide their trailers are, (2) have never seen a cyclist on the road, and (3) should all be removed from existence. Yes, they made the road just awful. I felt like I spent more time looking backwards (with my little glasses mirror) than forward. I lost count of the number of times I pulled onto the gravel shoulder to make way for the threatening camper trailers. It just sucked.
The good news is that we all got to Missoula safely, where another rest day was waiting for us. We're staying at the University of Montana - and I have been very impressed with their campus. So far they have the best cafeteria food that we have tasted on the trip.
By Erwin:
As Lucija writes, the first part of the trip was really nice. The road was nearly empty, the scenery was awesome and I felt great riding. Together with a group of three other riders we biked pretty fast to the lunch point at mile 56. As this was going to be my first century ride (100 miles), I was keen to get going quickly so that I would get miles in before it got too hot. As it turned out, the morning was actually really cold, which also meant that I wanted to keep peddling to stay warm (my shoes were still cold from the rain of the day before, so my feet were freezing).
The stretch on route 93 was clearly the worst piece of the ride so far, but I still enjoyed going up the hill and riding through the countryside. Some people came off the bike very excited about doing 100 miles, while others were mostly stressed out about the busy traffic. I was mostly excited about the ride when I was done, but the ride itself was pretty stressful.
As I am writing this, it is the end of our second rest day - it's been nice to relax a little, but the rest days fill up quickly. I slept in, cleaned my bike (three hours), and made a trip to the bike store. Now it's time to load up these pages on the site and go to bed (9pm at the latest!)...
Tomorrow we're on the hook for 99 miles - I might ride one extra to get in another 100 ;-). We will still going uphill as we're still west of the continental divide. On day three of this 5 day stretch to the next rest day, we're biking 66 miles to the divide and then we'll going down hill until Pennsylvania! The wind is still westerly, so we're lucky. Also the roads should be relatively quiet - we'll have to see what tomorrow brings.
Photos:
Too bad we did not take a photo of the ENORMOUS camper trailers... But here is what the road looked like BEFORE they got there. Just wonderful!
