2,000 miles to North Dakota

(Susan here, writing from Enderlin, North Dakota, “sunflower capital of the world”)

Standing at approximately the 2,000-mile point since leaving Silver Spring, near 139th St. and ND-46, a few miles east of Enderlin:

We just realized now that the mileage doesn’t include the 42 miles we did from the Chesapeake to our house, a couple weeks before we actually began the actual trip, so purists might consider the 2,000-mile point to be someplace yesterday afternoon.

In biking yesterday from Pelican Rapids to Moorhead, we passed through the small town of Sabin on county road 52, which parallels the interstate. We were extremely pleasantly surprised to find out that the Sabin General Store has a real soda fountain that makes phosphates (old-fashioned sodas) and also sells the most enormous variety of specialty bottled sodas I’ve ever seen in my life–Sabin has a population of about 500 people and I think that everyone in town could drink a different soda in this store. So we had to stop to have a root beer float made with some fancy molasses root beer. Anyway, if you’re driving into Moorhead or Fargo, get off the interstate at county road 10, turn right on 52, and stop in Sabin.

We came in yesterday evening to stay in Moorhead with Artini and David, whose daughter’s family is good friends with my sister’s family in California. Artini is a great cook and they both are great company so it was definitely a nice respite. Like me, David is a former Peace Corps volunteer, so it was fun to talk about serving back in the day when the main PCV mission was stopping the spread of Communism, not HIV.

Here’s some photos David took of Artini’s breakfast feast and us setting off this morning:

Today we crossed into North Dakota, biking over the Red River in the middle of city parks:

So far, North Dakota is pretty flat, as promised, but also has a lot more trees than people warned. Plus, we had a 15-mile-per-hour tailwind and it didn’t even really rain like it was supposed to. North Dakota haters, I’m not feeling you yet.

One note about North Dakota is that the speed limit on the little 2-lane county roads we’ve been on is 65 mph. Whoa.

Here’s our tentative itinerary for the next several days. There should be tailwinds for the next couple days, but after that, we may need to plug in a rest day here and there, depending on how fiercely the winds turn around:
Gackle
Hazelton
Bismarck
Glen Ullin
Dickinson
Beach, MT
Glendive
Circle

After that, we’ll hit US-2, which we’ll take clear across the top of Montana and over the mountains.