You might be asking yourself, “Meghan, why so resistant? Just go to the bike shop!” I was in Montana. There were vast spaces between towns. It was over 100 miles to Lewistown. I had to wrestle with skipping such a huge chunk of mileage. I wanted to backtrack when I got my bike working again, but we were getting so close to Great Falls! I was pretty upset even at the idea of driving it, and more upset when I actually had to give in. I told my mom she needed to give me an ultimatum, tell me we were going to Lewistown, because I’d keep trying to fix my bike until my brain exploded. I reminded myself of two things when I submitted. First, Lewis and Clark never went along the route I was biking. The sooner I skipped, the sooner I would return to the Missouri River, and second, Over the course of the last few thousand miles, particularly the 3 thousand I’d ridden before I had a support vehicle, I had added a lot of miles to my trip. I biked off the route searching for campgrounds or hotel, and second, I went to every single Lewis and Clark site, and everything tangentially related I could. That added a lot of mileage. I needed to let myself be more flexible. I’ve always been upfront about how much of a completionist I am. It’s the first thing I say to people when I tell them I started in Pittsburgh, not Saint Louis. I read A Walk in the Woods at my friend Becca’s recommendation as preparation for my trip. If Bill Bryson can write a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail when he only hiked maybe half of it, I don’t have to be so hard on myself for having to skip a hundred miles when I had no other option.
We left Jordan mid-morning after a grabbing a coffee in town. I was emotionally exhausted, so while my mom drove, I slept, even though I wanted to see the scenery change. It did change. It went from dry grass, and crispy hills to scattered pine trees and small mountains. We went straight to the bike shop. It was legitimate enough to be listed on my official Adventure Cycling Association map, but it was tucked into a residential neighborhood. My GPS led me to someone’s private home. We saw a woman emerge from the house and head for her van, but we didn’t react quickly enough to flag her down. She noticed us though! She turned around the corner and pulled up to our car. She saw my bike on the back. Turns out she was engaged to the bike mechanic, and they were getting married that weekend! We were there before the shop opened. He worked as a physical science teacher during the day. He ran his bike shop out of the shed in his yard. She said he’d be happy to help me and called him.
He came down and I explained my trouble to him. My mom and I grabbed lunch at a brewery in town. By mid-afternoon he called me and said my bike was ready. I was so relieved I took the bike and left, assuming the problem was fixed, I didn’t test it out. I needed to get to a coffeeshop and work on my blog. I knew I had to test it before I got back on the road though, so a few hours later, I hopped on my bike and my heart sank. It still wasn’t shifting. I called the mechanic and race back to the shop before he was meant to close. It was the same trouble I’d had when I tried to fix it myself. It worked on the stand, but the moment I tested it out, it didn’t work. I tested it three different times. He kept on adjusting it and then finally he tested it out himself. I know he was frustrated, I was frustrated, but he was polite and eternally patient. I waited outside the shop with my mom, trying to keep the mood light. The collar that attached my derailleur to my bike had a strip of rubber adhered to it that was meant to keep the derailleur from sliding down without biting into the metal. Because of the heat I’d been biking in, the adhesive had melted, so the derailleur kept slipping down.
I mentioned that little piece of rubber to my dad on the phone. It seemed like no matter what I did trying to move the derailleur, the derailleur wouldn’t sit on that piece of rubber. I thought it was my own failure, that I just couldn’t get the right angle, or didn’t have enough strength to tighten it where it would say. I felt vindicated that this man who obviously knew what he was doing far more than I did, had the same experience. I called my dad to tell him the answer to the conundrum, that the bike mechanic told me I should go to a bigger bike shop in Great Falls and see if they had a permanent solution to the problem. My dad suggested I get a hose clamp to prevent the slipping problem temporarily. I still had the hose clamps that held my bike rack on in those nerve-racking days before I had a support vehicle, so I used that. It solved the problem well enough, because I eventually made it to Great Falls.
We stopped at a sports store in Lewistown. My mom was done sleeping in the car and I didn’t blame her. Her friend Jean (the same Jean who joined my mom on her drive to meet up with me) suggested that we get another tent, but my mom was concerned about how much time it would take to set up and take down two tents. I suggested we get one tent that would fit both of us. That night we ate dinner at the Taco Time across the street. There was not a single actual taco on their menu.
From Lewiston I biked to Geraldine, Montana, a town approximately a block long. That was the first day I felt the need to bring my bear mace with me for the first time ever. I was biking through the Juliet Mountains, for the river William Clark named after his future wife. I was getting close to the Missouri again! I had experienced smoke North Dakota, but this was the first time I felt the need to cover my face with my neck gator while I biked. I knew we were close to fires. In Jordan we booked a room in a motel that was brimming with wildfire fighters. We were told it was close to town, but it hadn’t been problematic. The same thing had happened in Lewistown. You could even donate a drink to thank a firefighter at the brewery.
I didn’t doubt there were fires, but I hadn’t seen the evidence of them myself, only the hint, but I was having trouble breathing while cycling. It was hot, and it was hard to tell which was worse, wearing a mask while biking and stifling in the heat to save my lungs from particulates, or not wearing a mask, free from the heat of my gator but choking on particles of ash. It wasn’t obvious, but the smoke was affecting visibility. It got more obvious. As I biked down the road I saw a long object that stretched across the shoulder and more than half way across my lane of traffic. I thought it was debris until I got within 15 feet of it. Then I realized it was a rattlesnake. The recognition clicked, then the realization that this thing was HUGE. I shouted to no one, “That’s a snake! That’s a big snake!” The snake was facing toward the double yellow lines, so I made a split second decision. I pedaled hard and rolled into the crispy golden grass on the side of the highway. The snake saw me, started rattling its tail and lunged, but it had to propel itself from the double yellow line across the entire lane of traffic, across the shoulder to even get close to me. It didn’t even make it the length of its own body, and I just kept trucking, swearing profusely. That was a narrow escape.
We had lunch in Denton, a longer break than we intended, but the restaurant was surprisingly busy. A group of strangers asked me about my bike trip, the waitress seemed pretty interested as well, so we chatted for a while. I saw the same people again in Fort Benton. I think they were going on a canoeing or kayaking trip together down the Missouri River.
There wasn’t much in the way of campgrounds on that stretch, though it was safe to say we didn’t look particularly hard. We had the luxury of being able to drive to an alternative, so I suggested we go to Fort Benton. There were a number of museums I wanted to visit in town and it was the most populated city before Great Falls. We got there just before the museums closed and decided to hold off til the next day to explore, but we grabbed ice cream, took a picture of their Lewis and Clark statue and went to set up our tent. As we explored downtown briefly my mom noticed by sheer coincidence that Montana Shakespeare in the Parks was in town that night! So we hung out at our campground, chatted for a bit with our neighbor who was about go on a multiple day canoe trip down the Missouri, and headed to the park. It was a Midsummer Night’s Dream. We stayed for the beginning, camp chairs out, but I was hungry, and the turn-out was so good that the one food truck had run out of absolutely everything. We decided to depart and find a meal elsewhere.
My mom wasn’t particularly hungry, or particularly excited about spending money on a big meal, so I suggested we go somewhere to split an appetizer. We went to the Golden Triangle Brewery. Once again, we experienced magical timing. The brewery was a few questions into their trivia night but guess who won that trivia night. It was us. We won! I let a local about my age take a pic with the coveted belt, because her friends bailed on her and she wound up jumping in with another team.
We got back to the campground and I chatted with another man who was there to paddle the Missouri. He was a campground host somewhere in Montana, and I asked him for advice about camping in bear country. He said leaving your food in your car was the main thing, and sleeping with bear mace nearby. The fact that we got the tent and would keep our food away from it was the right idea. I felt slightly less paranoid.
The next day I backtracked to Geraldine and biked all the way to Fort Benton. I biked until lunchtime, we headed into the city to see the museums. I was worried about getting back when they closed again. There was an Upper Missouri interpretive center, and the Fort Benton Museum complex which included a Northern Great Plains Museum and the 19th Century fort. I was glad we went to the effort to see both. I pointed out an error on one of the signs in the museum, a sentence that implied Meriwether Lewis was in two places at once.
The Stars On the Horizon 