Tuesday, June 28th
First Impressions of North Dakota so far: green, quiet, pretty – not nearly as bleak as people had made it out to be. A little like cycling through the Windows 95 wallpaper for eight hours.
In fact there’s not a great deal to tell it apart from certain stretches of Illinois or Iowa i’ve cycled through. There have been small towns and services every 15-30 miles, despite not a great deal of anything in-between. However, I can certainly imagine these distances getting larger and the anything becoming more like nothing the further West you venture. Right now I’m 80 miles from Fargo tonight, in Little Yellowstone Park, a roadside park and campsite just to the side of the Route 46 which i’ve spent the greater part of today on.
I stopped for coffee at 20 Below Coffee on my way out of Fargo, where i’d spent some of the morning yesterday. Though I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as a coffee snob, I know good coffee when I find it – and I also know when it’s hard to find. Since I know that i’m going to be drinking shitty gas station coffee for at least the next week (or at best, my camp coffee) I wanted to get one last $4 hit before I left town.
After coffee (and a waffle) I cycled at first through Fargo’s attractive suburbs – treelined streets of small and large, pastel coloured wooden houses. But onward from here, into West Fargo, the city starts to lose it’s charm. The spaces between things open up, the horizon flattens out like a Monopoly board, and like Monopoly, the houses all look the same.
I briefly got lost in this suburban blandness after discovering a number of the roads heading West out of these neighbourhoods were closed due to road works. So I headed South, South-East I think, eventually getting back on the Northern Tier route close to Horace, where I stopped for a quick coffee, twenty miles in.
Shortly after this I bumped into Jay. He’d left Portland three weeks ago, and was making his way to New York. I was pleased to see he pulled his earphones and came over to speak, unlike some tourers i’ve seen who’ll wave or nod but not even risk a quick chat. We spoke for a while at the side of the road. Now, away from the suburbs, there was really nothing at all, and not a lot of traffic either, so you could almost conduct a conversation in the middle of the road.
Watching two cycling tourists meet each other like this, inspecting each others bikes and how their things are arranged through different combinations of panniers, bags, and straps, must be a little bit like watching two dogs sniffing each other in a park.
I gave him some tips for Fargo, and I got some Podcast suggestions from him. As it turned out we’d been listening to a lot of the same ones already, which made me wonder how many other cyclists were out there powering themselves across continents with these same voices in their ears.
After we parted I got on the Route 46. A more or less entirely straight road which ran across the entire state from what I could tell. It wasn’t always ideal for cycling as it had little to no shoulder at times, and there were long sections of roadworks still, but the options were limited out here. Most other roads were just gravel or dirt. On the upside there was little to no wind, and when traffic did pass, it never passed closely at all. Compared with Saturday it was a breeze.
I made one stop at a gas station but otherwise just kept going until I reached the park, 50-60 miles from where i’d stopped in Horace and I really can’t think of anything remarkable to say about them. Perhaps North Dakota is boring after all. But it was a good day, and I was happy to stop -an 80 mile day after a two day rest tends to feel more like 100.
For the first time ever I have my entire week planned out – the next 400 miles to Badlands, South Dakota. I spent some time yesterday afternoon locating campsites along my route, each around 65-85 miles apart. I’ve stocked up on food, i’m pretty confident where i’m going to sleeping, and should everything go to plan i’ll be camping in Badlands on July 4th.
It feels a bit more relaxing knowing this, and as the distance narrows between here and Vancouver i’m pretty confident some of my most enjoyable days are just around the corner, or since corners don’t exist in North Dakota, straight down the road.
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