We took advantage of this excellent program when we did our cross country tour. This summer, we have hosted six cyclists. Five of them were doing
transcontinental tours and one was heading north to Canada.

We haven’t forgotten the generosity of members of the Warm Showers List and want to give back to the bicycle touring community.

If you would like more information, please visit the Warm Showers List.

The one real disadvantage for us with hosting fellow touring cyclists is that we want to start touring with them!!!!

We do hope to bicycle the P’tit Train du Nord in Quebec sometime this year.

We have happily hosted several touring cyclists who belong to the Warm Showers List, an excellent resource for long distance cycling tourists.
Living right on a cross-state bicycle route, we expect to get more tourists later this month and into August.

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.