Coming soon.

So as of now, I have the first three weeks of the trips in sequential order. You can find them by going to the side bar and looking under the Find It tab.

Blogs are great if you follow along on a regular basis, but if you stumble upon one and want to read all of the entries, it is a bit of a pain. I promised long ago that I would arrange the trip on a page so that it would be easier to follow and finally I have started on that quest.

Simply go to the Trip week by week tab and choose a week.

That ferry ride saved us many miles and many hassles. One alternative would be to go across the Chicago area, which didn’t hold much appeal. We could have taken the ferry at more northerly Manitowoc or even ventured even farther north and come across the UP. We didn’t see any reason to add extra days to the trip, so we took the quickest route toward Toledo.

Being in familiar territory made it seem that we have covered some distance and are making progress. Although the miles added up quickly, it was difficult to get a sense of our accomplishment. Now that the territory is familiar to us, we have a better sense of place, distance and progress.

We knew that we would be staying in another trailer motel tonight, but that was fine with us. At least, it was a place to stay. Custer, the location of the motel definitely rates as the smelliest town we have visited. It seems that there are many feed lots nearby.

The next day we got an early start to Forsyth. The Hysham Hill was just outside of Custer. Little did we know that that one hill would turn into many. We did some serious climbing again today. This may have been one of our most intense days of climbing. I hated going down at all because it just meant that we would climb again and again and again.

It seems that the day either starts or ends with a climb, or does both. This was the case with entering Forsyth, a friendly town with a picturesque courthouse. We were not looking forward to an upcoming ride of 80 miles with basically no services and totally decided against it when a local suggested a longer, but less desolate route. It would add a day or two to our itinerary, but we were really in no hurry to get anywhere. Besides, we didn’t know when we would get to this area again.

The scenery in this area was spectacularly desert-like with many buttes thrown in for good measure. The trees had once again disappeared and I thought of this as a typical cowboy landscape. How different it is from the other end of the state near Glacier Park and Missoula, places that were quickly becoming distant memories.

The ride was a gradual climb at first followed by some steeper climbs. We made it into Butte before the rain and made decent time. The plan was to visit the area the next morning and head onto Bozeman, but that plan was altered by the threat of snow. We had a wonderful visit of the area in the morning under mostly blue skies. We hoped that the snow would be a joke, but that wasn’t the case. The snow came- 7″ of it – so we took the Greyhound to Bozeman. Not as simple as we thought.

While walking from the bus station to the hotel, we heard a local comment about our cycling prowess. Considering that we were simply pushing the bikes, we found the remark rather humorous. We arrived later in the day so we planned on touring Bozeman the next morning and then leaving in the early afternoon for the short ride to Livingston. As things go, the weather was following us, which meant that the snow was due to arrive in Bozeman. We simply hunkered down here another night so that we would have a pleasant ride over Bozeman Pass and into Livingston.

It was quite chilly on the day that we would be cycling over Bozeman Pass, so we bundled up in the clothes that we hadn’t needed for a long time. I thought that the days of wearing tights were long gone, but was glad that I had something to keep me warm.

We started up the pass and as we came close to the highest elevation, the snow began to fall. This road wasn’t the best as it had a disappearing shoulder and it was rather hard to see ahead with the snow blowing in our faces. We eventually reached the high point and were disappointed not to see an elevation marker. We got off the interstate as soon as a frontage road appeared and made the cold and quick decent into Livingston.

I had been to Livingston a few years prior to board a train for a tour of the area. We walked to the station and I tried to get our bearings. Since we had left Bozeman late, we were in town at the wrong time for lunch. Maybe restaurants had already stopped their lunch service for the day, but we eventually found a suitable Mexican restaurant.

Reed Point was next on the itinerary and we had a nice ride on mostly frontage roads. As has been the case almost every day, the wind picked up. We had an intense crosswind coupled with spurts of rain. our last 15 miles into town took more effort than I wanted to exert. It was such a relief to make it to the Montana Hotel, a nice change of scenery from the predictable decor of the chains that we had been staying in.

We trudged on through Montana and thought that we had already been in this state long enough to become residents. On the way to Billings, we pedaled very few miles on the interstate. We climbed some intense hills, but the climbs were worth the great views. Not shocking was the fact that we suddenly found ourselves riding into an intense headwind the last few miles into Billings. Our approach was not a good one, as it seemed like we could have avoided a very treacherous, congested bridge on the way to our motel. We crossed that without incident even though I know my heartrate was up and not from the pedaling.

We stopped in the small town of Drummond – how many big towns are there out here?- and had a better breakfast and took refuge from the weather. We didn’t rush to leave, but figured if we had to fight the wind that we should get back on the road to Deer Lodge. We did plan on visiting the Grant Kohrs ranch (listen to a podcast of the ranch at the bottom of the page)there and having dinner with some people who knew the area well.

Deer Lodge had an interesting old jail and really was an oasis in the middle of nowhere. We carefully watched the weather as there was a winter storm advisory. We were glad that we didn’t do the Scenic Pinter Road as we heard that had snow already. Although the weather was quite chilly when we started the ride in Astoria, we had gotten used to not having serious precipitation for a long while. And we weren’t expecting precipitation in the form of snow.

Lunch was good and a treat, unlike the road into Missoula. We hadn’t been near a big city in ages and traffic lights and heavy traffic were foreign to us. We made it safely into town and looked for a pathway to take us to the center of the city. As luck would have it, we found another kind stranger who led us into town and directed us to the library so that we could update the blog and check email.
Missoula was not our final stop since we had such a short day yesterday. We had many more miles to get to our final destination of Rock Creek, so we opted to take I-90 as it was the shortest route possible. The first several miles of riding were quite unpleasant as there was lots of traffic and the shoulder totally disappeared when we crossed over bridges. This forced us into the lanes of traffic, which was quite treacherous. At least we had a tailwind for this part of the ride and were ticking off the miles quickly.

When we reached Rock Creek we found our lodging for the night and headed to a very nice restaurant. I was distracted by signs at the nearby campground warning about bears; not my favorite animal. We found a nice laundry facility and washed our clothes for the first time in awhile. It’s always so nice to have clean clothes. Smelly clothes probably attract bears.

From here on in, we have many days to traverse Montana. There are more passes coming along the way. We decided not to go to Helena, but through Butte and then over to Livingston and Billings. Until we return again, we don’t know what we missed going this direction. We do know that there is a scenic mountain road that we would like to travel on – with a car.