Day 10 Missoula to Avon

Day 10 Missoula to Avon

4th of July and 100 miles. Sound fun?

Scot, Alison and I are riding together again and we add Tom and shortly therafter Ben, is added to our group to make 5. It starts off colder than I thought and my fingerless gloves aren’t enough so I do a rolling switch and take the shorties off to put on my long fingered gloves. Well in all the switch I manage to lose a shortie but I don’t discover thatunitl the water stop. Oh well, it is easliy replacable, I just don’t look forward to riding all hot dayin long fingered gloves.

The days are running together. We get to the end of a day and can barely remember teh details of the morning. Days of the week have no meaning for us. What numbered day of teh ride, is losing importance. Currnelty we are in the “middle”. Destinations are the biggest delineator we have of days but that only works for about 24 hours, then we brain dump the images and reset the mental computer to do it all again tomorrow.

For me days are starting to develop essenses. The essense for today was “SoundScapes”. Read and see what I mean.

As we were riding we got bored, so Alison got us composing Haikus (japanese 3 line poems that don’t rhyme, but have a syllable structure. Line one is 5 syllables, line 2 has 7 syllables and line 3 reverts back to 5 syllables.)

So as our group fo 5 is spinning away, we are taking turns shouting out haikus. 2 of my favorites were

The Summer is nye
Hill climbs Big Riders endure
Downhills we treasure
- alison

Boy, does my butt hurt
Boy, does my butt hurt a lot
Boy, does my butt hurt
- scott

And for about an hour we rolled on in this fashion. Then Tom offered up a mystery game sort of like 20 questions. We get the sceneof death we have to figure out the motive behind it. We are still working on that one so that has lasted 300 miles. But again the verbal games were part of the day.

Also the collective humm and buzz of 5 cyclists all cruising down the road is louder that I realized. Many times wehn i was up front leading, the humm was so loud, that I mistook t for a “ car back” coming up to pass us.

We continue to see deer here and there.

Ahead I lead us up to Phil, who has broken a spoke. Now we were all warned to bring extra spokes and I diligently have mine on my bike with me, but I have no idea what to really dowith them. And all wheels have a different spoke. some are flat or bladed, some are strait, some are rounded and depending on how they mount to the hubs, they vary greatly in length. Alison winds up having hte right spoke, I have a spoke wrench, Scott and Phil know what to do and get it replaced, but then the tension has it all out of true.





I undersatnd the truing aspect and I get his wheel trued enough in the forks that he can ride the rest of the 50 miles to camp, and have the mechanic look at it in camp. So in 20 minutes we are done witha major road side repair and off and rolling again. Just as we finish, the mechanic shows up and concurs that he is good enough for now and will get further work in camp. What a team we are all becoming.

Rolling along a little further Alison and my fet get hot and we covet this col little river next to us, so we stop with Ben, make our way to the rivers edge, take off our shoes and put our feet in the water. The water itself is not to scary, but eht rocks and plants are definitely... well as Alison puts it ... they are “skeevy”. Farm and Pasture run off and cow effluent has been down this path before. But he water is cool and refreshing and we figure as long as we have no open wounds on our feet we are good to go!



WE start a trend and the next 8 cyclists through all stop and do the same thing. It feel so good and our feet are so miserably hot. We all love it and thatis what gets us trhough the rest of the afternoon.




Rolling on through the afternoon it is just hot. We start seeing pronghorn antellope occaisionally. We through open flat Big Sky country. 2 hawks scream and play in the afternoon thermals. Little songbirds land and sing to us. They sing a song that I associate with easter egg hunts and srpingtime from when I was kid growing up.


We are totally on a back highway. I separate from the other riders a bit and just stop to listen to the absolute silence of it all. No. engines, no hums. no cars int he distance, no river babble, even the soft whir of my pedals as stopped as I sit for a moment in the quiet. not even a wind to make a ruslte. I hear exactly 2 beetles and various intervals and in the intervals between, there is nothing to hear! It is totally amazing.

Finally we are into the last 10 miles and ready for his day to be over.

No matter how far you ride the last 10 miles seem like the longest 10 of your life.
WE roll in and stop at the cafe that our route guide has advised has good pie. We get burgers, shakes, sandwiches pie, and make the collective personality of 10 riders, fill the little place that might seat 35. Its about 1:00 pm and we love the rest. WE head out and ride teh longest 3 miles known to man, or so it feels. Our route guide says that it is only a 98 miles day. I skip our turn and ride the extra mile and back to round out the day at a nice 101 miles. Another Century under my belt.

We are camping up in the trees again and it feels cool.

INSERT AVON CAMP

The owner of Avon cafe with the Pie, is our catering host and merves up a wonderful spaghetti meat sauce. MMMMMm.. Delicious.


HAPPY 4th of July. No fireworks for us.

I stay up late, well after sundown and journal by flashlight. A freight train rumbles by and the sound of a few birds warbling fills the space between occasional passing traffic.

Even journaling, itis quiet enough to hear the scratch of the pen on the paper and its rhythm. It comes in bursts. Some things just rush out... then stop. Other thoughts are longer and just flow.

As I said ... a day of sound scapes.


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