Medora, like Fedora! Not Moderna.

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The next morning I was a bit obsessed with the idea of getting coffee. I got on highway 200 and headed west, and sent my mom on ahead, evidently too far up the highway. I knew we were meant to turn toward Beulah, ND. My maps are pretty complicated to get used to. It’s not one map that covers the entire leg of my journey, but a bunch of smaller maps that constantly change orientation. There are way markers that measure mileage and letters to mark when there are turns, but it can be difficult to find where you are if you don’t study it, especially if you don’t start and end at the same waymarker. I kind of sent my mom out into the wilderness. I had her take a picture of the maps for that day, but that was all. I thought I’d meet with my mom right before the turn. As it turned out, that’s where some heavy duty road work started. My mom was on the other end of the mess when I texted her hinting we should meet at the coffee shop. She didn’t want to come back through it. I was pretty sure I was going to get a coffee either way, even if I just took a detour and biked there… Then I realized my mistake and I had to apologize and ask her to come back. We met at the coffee shop. I got there first and awkwardly waited in the parking lot for about ten minutes. It was more of a coffee hut than a shop. Drive-thru only, and businesses don’t generally take kindly to bicycles in their drive-thrus. There were a lot of cars and it was a long wait.

It was a push to get to our planned endpoint. There were consistent hills snaking between buttes. I made one more turn before Glen Ullin. I got a second wind though, when I reached to the end of the road, turned and saw fields and fields of sunflowers as far as I could see with buttes hovering on the horizon line. Not long after I met up with my mom and we checked out the campground. It was basically a park. There wasn’t a whole lot of shade, no showers, just a vault toilet. It’s been a gradual process, easing my mom into living on the road as I had over the past few months. My mom’s the type of person who can’t deal if she doesn’t get a shower every day. She’d chosen to skip a shower at our campground that morning which proved to be a mistake. So we decided to take advantage of the car at our disposal. We drove to Dickenson to check out the campground situation there. The one in Glen Ullin was inexpensive. The ones in Dickenson were overflowing with RVs and cost nearly as much as a hotel. We caved and got a cheap hotel instead.

Next morning we went back to Glen Ullin and I biked toward Dickenson. We met up in Hebron and I tried huckleberry soda for the first time at a cute little coffee shop called Dark Side of the Brew. If a town has a population of more than 500 people, they usually have a coffee shop. This had been especially true for North Dakota and would continue to be true in Montana down the road. There were a few museums I wanted to check out in Dickenson before they closed at 5pm. I never enjoy feeling like I’m on a time crunch. It’s always tough to judge how difficult the road is going to be up ahead. Sometimes there’s unexpected detours or flat tires. I didn’t want to get to town just before the museums closed and not get to experience them. So my mom and I decided to take a lunch break and come back later to finish out my ride. There was a museum center with a dinosaur museum, my primary interest, and a museum on local history and culture. Some highlights (beyond dinosaurs), included their mineral collection, including florescent rocks that lit up like a psychedelic poster under blacklights, a collection of women’s hats and displays on North Dakota through the decades complete with outfits. I completed my ride for the day, made my mileage goal and had tacos for dinner. I had officially finished yet another map, and therefore another leg of my journey.

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Back in Bismarck I got my bike tuned up with hopes that they’d be able to replace my chainring. Back in Peducah I was adviced to get the ring replaced before I within the next 2000 miles. I was definitely past 2000 miles in Bismarck. They didn’t have the part, so they told me to swing by the bike shop in Medora, that even if they didn’t have the part they might be able to figure out a solution for me. Lance at Larson’s Cyclery knew Lorne at Dakota Cyclery personally and told me I could trust him to come up with a solution.

We got there shortly after the bike shop opened. Medora is just outside of Teddy Roosevelt National Park and it has the old west kitsch vibe that towns outside of Yellowstone have. We spent the morning window shopping in souvenir stores. I really wanted a shirt that said “Ain’t She a Butte” I had no luck. I did, however, fall in love. Now, if you’ve been reading this blog since the beginning, you know about my travel mascot, Sea (named for Meriwether Lewis’s dog, Seaman). My prairie dog obsession is also well established. Well, one shop had large prairie dog stuffed animals that were so flipping soft. I generally try to curb my gut reactions when shopping by leaving the store. If I forget about the item then I wasn’t meant to have it, but I saw this little guy that morning and came back in the afternoon, my need not diminished. So, I adopted Pomp, or Jean-Baptiste “Pompey” Charbonneau, named after Sacagawea’s son. His belly is just so darn cute. I’ve been away from my pet chinchilla, Pip for so long and I miss her belly something awful. This was softening the homesickness for my baby.

We grabbed lunch at a saloon and snagged tickets to a Teddy Roosevelt show a woman at our first campground said everyone would interrogate us about. “Have you seen the play?” We saw the play. No one asked us. I brought Pomp with me to see the show. It was a blast. They seem to put on the show almost every afternoon, a one man show by a Theodore Roosevelt impersonator. It was a charming show. The man is an absolute wealth of knowledge. There was music in the town square after we planned to see, and just when I got out of the theatre I got a call that my bike was ready.

My mom and I decided to go to the park before the sun set. We had been there before on the road trip that inspired my obsession, and I knew it was abundant with prairie dog towns. We spent some time at the first town, but there was a group of children that kept on chasing the poor babies. We moved down to another prairie dog town. As we sat there on a bench, watching my joy, the prairie dogs, a car pulled up. A man with an impressive camera came to take pictures of animals with his son. Unlike the first group of children, this kid was a delight. He was smart and was a junior ranger at what looked like every single national park that ever was. He had a number of the badges pinned to his shirt. I think he’s going to be a ranger someday. We talked about prairie dogs—our mutual favorite animal. I told him about my chinchilla and may have accidentally set him on a life journey to get one for himself. I also let him know about my bike trip, and he thought I was messing with him. I told him how far I’d biked so far and his reaction was perfect. They headed out, and soon after we got back into the car. We were hoping we’d see a buffalo. They said they’d seen a few up the road. Well, we saw one, just walking down the road toward us. I love National Parks. Someone will see something and stop, a signal to the person behind them that there’s something worth seeing. It means everyone’s less likely to miss something exciting. At 9 o’clock we went to a talk about jobs with the NPS. I’ll tell you, I was expecting that a talk at 9pm would be more for the adults, but the audience was full of kids. I felt like an oversized child myself. I’ve thought about applying for jobs with the parks. I think I’d make a pretty good interpreter.

Monday was my day off, though it felt like I’d already taken one, since I’d finished biking so early the day before. My mom and I went on a road trip to the Northern Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. My mom and I had both been to the Southern Unit before. I new the northern unit had interesting rock formations called concretions and I wanted to see what it was about. We saw some buffalo, drove to the end of the park and headed back to camp. First we grabbed lunch. I tried chokecherry jam for the first time. It was maddeningly hot. We returned to the southern unit and spent the afternoon in a picnic shelter where I wrote my next round of postcards.