To Bozeman!

This morning I woke up in Bozeman, Montana, on a lumpy pull out sofa bed with the bright orange sun in my eyes. I've never been so grateful.

Ben and I biked all the way from our camping spot at the I-90/hwy 247 junction to Bozeman yesterday (67 miles in total, or my biggest day yet!) I hadn't really had any major physical complaints yet, apart from the strange numbness in my feet and hands, but yesterday I got the joy of experiencing butt blisters for the first time. That's right. Butt blisters. Part of me naively thought I would be solid on the butt front, as I have a relatively ample one at my disposal. But turns out my extra padding does nothing but slump to the side as my bike seat gets right in there and finds the exact location of my Sitz bones. Apparently this is a common problem for bikers, as there are oodles of products out there to rub on sore buttocks' and prevent more chafing. Sorry for the graphic details, dear readers, but this is my life now.

We stopped in Norris, Montana for a lunch break. Norris consists of two intersecting highways, a handful of dilapidated houses in a sea of rolling farmland, the Norris Bar/Antique Store, and a surprisingly bustling outdoor furniture store. We dismounted in front of the furniture store, at which point a plump woman came scurrying out and insisted we "rest our hands and bums" and sit for a while. So we pulled out all our various snacks and ate under a newly constructed gazebo for sale just as it started to rain. We put away several sticks of string cheese, an apple and peanut butter, a bag of sea salt and vinegar chips, some radishes and snap peas from the farmer's market in Townsend, and some pastries from our obligatory Wheat Montana stop that morning. Delicious! Folks, quite possibly the best thing about biking all day every day is that you can eat whatever you want. I swear fitness gyms would increase their membership rates by the thousands if they changed their tactic and started advertising the amount of calories you can gobble up if you only burn 10,000 calories a day or so.

The last half of the day was beautiful, but challenging. We followed the Madison River downhill through charred canyons with black toothpick tree trunks reaching towards the sky (we found out later the region had suffered a big wildfire just a month ago). We went over loads of "slow rollers" as Ben calls them---rolling hills that don't seem like a big deal when you're driving, but are endlessly frustrating when on a bicycle. It started raining pretty heavy about 20 miles out of Bozeman, and we got to try out our rain jackets and fenders for the first time. We finally made it to Bozeman around 8pm or so, and rolled right up to the home of Emily Wallace, a friend of Ben's who spent the summer in Juneau last year, working at Gastineau Guiding! Exhausted, soaking and dragging our sore bums behind us, Emily greeted us with hugs and cold beers, shooed us into the shower and made us delicious curry. 

So that's a little backstory to why I'm so incredibly grateful to be where I am right now. I was just telling Ben...if nothing else, bike touring makes you appreciate the little things so much more than you ever could otherwise. I don't think I've ever enjoyed peeling off wet biking shorts, standing under running hot water for 15 minutes, or waking up on a lumpy sofa bed so dang much. All these things we take for granted. They're incredible, really.