Milestones

When you do a trip like this, it's important to recognize milestones, so that's what I'm going to do today.  What got me thinking about this was Paul C celebrating crossing 1500 miles under the humongous udder of the New Salem, ND Cow.

 

We've passed several other milestones.  We've gotten three weeks under our belts (butts?).  And we're through the first of four "M-States" (Montana), ie., states whose names start with "M".  Yesterday we switched over to central time, losing the second of our three hours crossing the US.   And today we had our first day of riding in the rain after 22 days of sunshine.

 

 

It's a little hard to see in this picture, but the really cool thing we noticed in today's rain storm was the streams of rain falling mostly vertically from the clouds, then hitting the horizontal shear flow of the air near the ground that was powering the side/cross wind we were fighting and going much more sideways.  It made us wish we were biking at 5,000'.  Looking back in the same storm we saw a cloud highlighted against the dark background as the storm approached from the west.

 

 

The milestone here is the transition from summer into fall.  Hopefully we are through most of the hot-hot days, but fall will bring with it colder temperatures, morning frosts, and probably more rainy days.  Let's hope we start getting some more tailwinds as we head into central ND!