Across North Dakota

North Dakota was a surprise to our geographic bubble: not flat; not dry; not treeless (as in, there are trees). Industrial scale agriculture. Nice, fine people.

Badlands in ND near Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Day	Town	Distance	Riding Time	Elevation Gain	Avg. Speed
26	Medora, ND	63.5 miles	5:34 hours	2,586 feet	11.4 mph
27	Bismarck, ND	68 miles	6:29 hours:min	2,067 feet	10.5 mph
28	Napoleon, ND	68.4 miles	5:18 hours	2,218 feet	12.9 mph
29	Clausen Springs, ND	94.2 miles	7:16 hours	2,247 feet	13 mph
30	Fargo, ND	82.7 miles	6:31 hours	1104 feet	12.7 mph

Time for more full disclosure. Medora to Bismarck is actually about 128 miles. I wasn’t up for that in one day, but I was aiming for 100 miles. Didn’t happen: 1. Late start. 2. Chose Perkins for breakfast–took an hour and a quarter for pancakes, eggs, and bacon–morale: eat local (topic for a future post). Result: later start. 3. Time change costing another hour: 12 or so counties in western N. Dakota are Mountain Time and the rest of the state is Central Time. 4. Plotting bad course with almost 30 miles of dirt road–turned around which cost 10 miles. 5. Imminent thunder storms.

Lame excuses; stuff happens. In the grand scheme of things I’ll make up much of it with other rides and a lot of north–south distance that doesn’t get us further east.